Karim Mattar: Industry Roundtable 2/10/16
Karim Mattar, CISE’s roundtable speaker, on February 10, 2016, led an informal Q & A discussion with CISE students about careers within academia and industry and the skills required to work in a professional environment. At BU, PhD students are perfectionists and detail-oriented, however, as Mattar claimed, “once you get into industry, this notion goes away. You have to execute and get the product out almost immediately. Also, make sure you understand the company you work for, their corporate culture and now, in industry, you have to consider the customer.”
Currently, Mattar is the Principal Lead Performance Engineer at Akamai Technologies, leading a team of performance engineers to grow and improve the performance of Akamai’s top Media accounts, including Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Sony. At Akamai, “I learned to keep learning because there are many opportunities out there and you might miss out.” Mattar said that, for him, learning and networking, maintaining relationships, in school as well as after graduation, is vital and goes a long way.
His PhD thesis, supervised by Dr. Ibrahim Matta, focused primarily on understanding the dynamics of policy routing protocols and his research interests lie in the field of computer networks. He has also worked on problems related to Internet measurement, transport protocols and clean-slate Internet architectures. While at Sprint Advanced Technology Labs,’05-’06, and Movik Inc., ’08-’09, he worked on transport, scheduling and resource allocation problems in cellular data networks (more specifically 1xRTT, EV-DO and HSDPA).