Abstract¶
The NSF Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) program has funded a remarkable range of projects across the UC system—each taking a research software project and asking how it becomes something bigger: a sustainable community, a shared resource, an ecosystem. This panel brings together UC-affiliated POSE principal investigators to reflect on that journey. Panelists will share what their projects do, who their communities are, how POSE funding changed their approach, and what sustainability looks like beyond the grant—followed by open discussion about the lessons, surprises, and hard-won wisdom of building open source at a research university.
Jarrod Millman | UC Berkeley¶
Jarrod Millman is a Senior Open Source Scientific Python Developer at BIDS and the Executive Director for Berkeley’s Open Source Program Office (OSPO). With a background in computer science, mathematics, and statistics, and degrees from Cornell and Berkeley, Millman is a founding member of the scientific Python ecosystem. His primary focus is on developing and sustaining open-source, community-owned scientific software tools. Millman serves on the steering council of NetworkX, is a core developer of scikit-image, and was an early contributor to NumPy, SciPy, and scikit-learn. He has co-founded several influential initiatives to advance open and reproducible research, including the Scientific Python project, the nonprofit NumFOCUS, and the Neuroimaging in Python project.
Harikrishna Kuttivelil | UCSC¶
Harikrishna Kuttivelil is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science & Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, studying the intersection of networking and machine learning and their applications in environmental monitoring, smart cities, and AI democratization. His research focuses on decentralized strategies for collaborative, privacy-preserving machine learning at the network’s edge. He is a member of the InterNetworking Research Group (i-NRG) with Professor Katia Obraczka as his advisor.
Andrew Kahng | UCSD¶
Andrew B. Kahng is Distinguished Professor of CSE and ECE and holder of the endowed chair in high-performance computing at UC San Diego. He is the principal investigator of OpenROAD, a nationwide project that is making chip design more accessible through free, open-source tools. OpenROAD, initially supported by DARPA and recently funded by the NSF POSE program, created the first open-source software capable of automating many of the most complex parts of the chip design process. Kahng is coauthor of 3 books and over 500 journal and conference papers, holds 35 issued U.S. patents, and is a fellow of ACM and IEEE.
Stephanie Lieggi | UCSC¶
Stephanie Lieggi is Executive Director of the UC Santa Cruz Open Source Program Office and Chair of the UC OSPO Network. She served as Principal Investigator on the NSF POSE Phase I grant for Skyhook Data Management, a CROSS-incubated project that embeds data management and processing into distributed storage systems using Apache Arrow and Ceph. (She is also part of the ongoing NSF POSE I project.) Stephanie’s work aims to support open source community development and student programs at UCSC, including co-developing the Open Source Research Experience (OSRE). She serves on the Board of Directors of the Apereo Foundation, which supports open source software in higher education, and has been active in broader efforts to promote the OSPO model in academia, including co-chairing the CHAOSS University Working Group.
Sanjit A. Seshia | UC Berkeley¶
Sanjit A. Seshia is the Cadence Founders Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. He received an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. His research interests are in formal methods for dependable and secure computing, spanning the areas of cyber-physical systems, computer security, distributed systems, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics. He has made pioneering contributions to the areas of satisfiability modulo theories (SMT), SMT-based verification, and inductive program synthesis. He is co-author of a widely-used textbook on embedded, cyber-physical systems and has led the development of technologies for cyber-physical systems education based on formal methods. He is a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.