Roxana Geambasu facts for kids
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Roxana Geambașu is a smart Romanian-American computer scientist. She teaches Computer Science at Columbia University in the United States. Her work focuses on exciting topics like cloud computing (which is like storing your files and apps on the internet), keeping things safe online (security and privacy), and how operating systems (like Windows or macOS) work.
Contents
Becoming a Computer Scientist
Roxana Geambașu grew up in Ploiești, a city in Romania. She studied Computer Science and Engineering at the Politehnica University of Bucharest. She was so good that she graduated in 2005 as the top student in her class!
Later, she moved to the United States to continue her studies in Computer Science at the University of Washington. While she was there, a big company called Google even helped support her research. She earned her Ph.D. (a very high degree) in 2011. Her main project for her Ph.D. was about how people can keep control of their information when it's stored in the cloud or on mobile phones.
What She Has Done
Making Data Disappear Safely
When Roxana was a student, she led a cool project called Vanish. Imagine sending a secret message that disappears after someone reads it – that's what Vanish was trying to do with digital information! It was all about making "self-destructing data" to help people keep their information private.
Checking How Ads Use Your Data
In 2014, Roxana and her team at Columbia University created a special tool called XRay. This tool helped them see if online ads were using people's private information. They used XRay to look at how Gmail (Google's email service) showed ads. They found that Gmail's advertising tool sometimes used sensitive personal details to show ads, even though Gmail's rules said they wouldn't do that. This work helped people understand more about how their data is used online.
Awards and Recognition
Roxana Geambașu has received several important awards for her amazing work. In 2014, Popular Science magazine named her one of their "brilliant ten" scientists because of her research on how companies use personal data.
In 2016, she received a Sloan Research Fellowship. This is a special award given to young scientists who are doing important research, especially for her work on keeping cloud and mobile data private. She has also won other awards, including one for her excellent Ph.D. project and two "best paper" awards at big computer science conferences.
