UCPH Computer Science students at the forefront: Will present their theses at a reputable conference

Anna Lesniak and Prangshuman Das had a distinguished ending of their MSc programme. As the first authors of their respective scientific papers, they started their careers with an extra advantage.

And it is not just any conference that the two candidates will soon be attending. DEBS is the leading conference in the field of distributed and event-based systems, which is a hot topic in the industry. It is the place where the greatest minds of the field gather about the latest results and, this year, only 27 percent of the submitted papers ended up being accepted.

- I am grateful that my supervisors believed in me and suggested that I write a scientific paper based on my thesis. As a student at DIKU, you can easily choose to carry out projects that contribute to research. I look forward to presenting our work at the conference, says Anna Lesniak, who now works at the Tech Unicorn company Zendesk.

Contributes to a new area

Anna and Prangshuman have both written their thesis on so-called microservices – a new software architecture where the application is divided into autonomous and smaller services instead of having one single deployment unit. In fact, it is so new that a lot more knowledge about this special architecture is needed.

This didn’t turn out to be a hindrance for Anna and Prangshuman who joined the research group at the department that works with event-based systems, particularly microservices. Professor Yongluan Zhou, who is also head of studies for MSc in Computer Science, leads the group. Anna and Prangshuman were also supervised by the PhD student Rodrigo Nunes Laigner.

- It was a cherry on top to contribute to an academic conference while working on my thesis. I’m proud to have achieved this, and it would not have been possible without the resilient support and guidance from Yongluan and Rodrigo. In general, I experienced an encouraging learning and teaching environment at the department, says Prangshuman Das, who now works at Microsoft.

In short, Prangshuman has created a tool to help microservice software developers make better design choices. Anna developed a system that will ensure that software developers develop microservices correctly. 

- Anna and Prangshuman have each done a piece of work that can help solve some real challenges. Microservices are used by a handful of large companies like Amazon, but it is something that many more are interested in implementing, says PhD student Rodrigo Nunes Laigner.