By Jennifer Brouner

Every semester, computer science professor James Plank chooses only the top undergraduates to join his research family and participate in advanced research. In 2007, Katie Schuman was adopted into Plank’s lab family and has impressed him with her computer programming skills and creative insight ever since.

For the past three summers, Schuman has worked eight hours a day writing new computer code and testing its efficiency. Every hour spent in front of her computer brought her closer to an improvement in the technique of erasure coding, a highly sophisticated method of data storage.

Each of Schuman’s summers involved a different project requiring hard work and dedication. During the summer of 2008, Plank assigned Schuman her very own project: to find out how his erasure-coding library compared to others around the world.

Schuman was asked to read and adapt the code for each online-accessible erasure-coding library. She wrote code to command each library to perform the exact same task and measured the time it took to complete. After three months of effort, Plank and Schuman were able to evaluate the efficiencies of the libraries.

The results were eventually published in the proceedings of File and Storage Technologies (FAST), one of the most prestigious computer science conferences. Schuman was cited as a third author in this publication. As an undergraduate, she was already making meaningful contributions to the storage research community.

During Schuman’s second summer, Plank presented his undergraduates with a different type of challenge. He asked each student to write his or her own Facebook application, with the ultimate goal of generating a large amount of data that Plank and his team could protect using erasure coding.

Schuman created a Facebook app that generated photo collages, and it quickly became a hit with users across the globe. Plank and Schuman watched as the application spread from Knoxville throughout Tennessee, then across the country, and finally throughout Europe and Israel. Within two weeks of launching the application, Schuman was astonished that more than 33,000 people were using her program.

Schuman’s third and final summer was spent completing an undergraduate thesis. The results of her research project, “An Exploration of Optimization Algorithms and Heuristics for the Creation of Encoding and Decoding Schedules in Erasure Coding,” were published in Pursuit: The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee.

After researching with Plank for three years, Schuman had accumulated enough experience to write her own ticket to graduate school. She applied to UT, Georgia Tech, and Vanderbilt and was accepted to all three.

Although Schuman could have gone elsewhere, she wanted to conduct research at UT and stay close to her family. She is currently pursuing a PhD at UT Knoxville under the supervision of J. Douglas Birdwell, professor of electrical engineering and computer science. After graduation, she plans to initially pursue a position as a researcher in a government-funded laboratory or for a research company in the private sector, with possible future plans as a university or college faculty member.