Research Center

ZAK

Hometown: Lisle, IL 

Major / Minor: Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence)

Extracurricular Activities @ U of I: CS 473 - Tutor

Favorite Class @ U of I:  CS 473:  Machine Learning

Hobbies: Footbag, percussion, origami, pepperoni, bacon

Favorite Quote: “I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of them.” – Isaac Asimov

Hero/Role Model:  Vasek Klouda, freestyle footbag world champion

Favorite Restaurant in C-U: Noodles and Co.

Favorite Music: 311, Andrew Bird, A Perfect Circle, The Beastie Boys, Bob Dylan, Bob Marley and the Wailers, Built to Spill, Cake, The Crystal Method, Daft Punk, The Decemberists, The Flaming Lips, Franz Ferdinand, Fujiya and Miyagi, Gnarls Barkley, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Gorillaz, Headlights, Incubus, Interpol, The Killers, Led Zeppelin, The Mars Volta, Minus the Bear, Modest Mouse, Muse, Nirvana, The Offspring, Peter Bjorn and John, Phish, Pink Floyd, Portugal. The Man, The Postal Service, Queens of the Stone Age, The Raconteurs, Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Santana, The Shins, Smashing Pumpkins, The Strokes, Sublime, Sufjan Stevens, System of a Down, Tool, The Weakerthans, Weezer, The White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Favorite Movies: Too many to name

Favorite TV Shows: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld, Scrubs

Best college advice:  Don’t go to classes that are boring: it’s a waste of time.

Project Work @ RC: I’m an intern in Systems and this is my second semester with State Farm working on my project. My work is in the Product and Agreement domain, which deals with modeling and maintaining data representing insurance products and the actual agreements SF has with customers. There are Product Modelers in this area who build these models of insurance policies. These product models are utilized by SF agent software to determine which information is needed from customers before a policy is taken out. In turn, rules in the model determine eligibility and pricing based on that information. A variety of software needs to be written and maintained in order for this to happen. My job is to write a tool that will be used internally by State Farm employees in this domain. State Farm has recently been starting to phase out lots of its legacy software infrastructure that was written in COBOL and PL/1. They plan to rewrite or port this old code into Java. My project is a small part of this process. The tool I’m designing is used to test the Request Framework, which handles building actual instances of insurance policy agreements. It will be used by Product Modelers, Framework Analysts, and User Interface developers. The tool basically communicates with the Request Framework, allowing users to build an instance of a product model. Agents use software that does this same thing. My tool is used to simulate this process for the model builders and software developers. My project isn’t really research; it’s development. For the Systems people out there, I’m basically writing a rich web client and a server back-end that will communicate with some web services and databases. I’ve already written thousands of lines of HTML and JavaScript for the front-end. Soon, I’ll start development for a J2EE Websphere server application.

What brought you to the RC? My ’94 Crown Victoria Police Interceptor

Best thing about working at the RC: Free snacks and coffee

Most surprising thing you’ve learned about State Farm: They have 4 petabytes of data!