[...]
CYNTRICA EATON: When I was a little girl, my grandmother
bought a Tandy 1000 computer and I didn't think it was anything
interesting. But every time someone would come to the house,
they would be like, "Oh, wow. You have a computer." So I
turned it on and this was pre-Windows, so it was a DOS C
prompt blinking at me. So I'm like this isn't exciting at all.
So I picked up the brochures around and I played around with
it because clearly there's something there. I'm just
missing it. And I stumbled upon basic programming. And I would
type in simple programs from the book and it would run. And I
would be really excited that I typed in my name and it would
say hello. And I'd be like, "How did it do that?" But I
just typed the code in and so later on I learned how programs
work and it just pulled me in.
What sticks out most is when I was in graduate school and I
really wanted to give up. And my advisor gave me this very
poignant analogy about being in traffic and not turning around
just because you aren't getting there quick enough. And I think
that was really helpful largely because it stuck with me so
long. And I think about it when I'm—when my students have those
same kinds of issues.
The one that sticks out—my mom used to buy Highlights magazines
for me. And I—I can remember an experiment where you would take
a piece of ice and you would put a string on it, sprinkle some
salt, and it would kind of melt in, so you could actually pull
the piece of ice up with the string. So I decided to make a
necklace for my mom which meant I actually went and got some
food coloring. So I got several pieces of ice, a really long
piece of string, lots of salt, food coloring, and it became
very messy. But it was really a learning experience for me and I
really thought that was really cool.
I think the ability to have an idea, have a spark about
something, and kind of explore it and involve a community of
people, students, other colleagues, and coming to the
table and having these like really exciting ideas and
moving on them.
I think being able to kind of maybe in some cases connect dots
that don't seem like they're connected at all. I think some
very interesting research is when I pull from biology
something that's going to actually help me in computer
science. So having the ability to see where there is
similarities and pulling those things together I think
is really important.
So I'm working with web fault detection. So basically, you
have one website that you pull up in two different browsers and
they look very different. The quality is very different. And
so that kind of pulls away from the original intent of having
this universal platform. So the societal impact of my research
is enabling web developers to notice that their web pages
won't work on various clients before they release them and to
possibly fix that to avoid having users have issues
with their websites.
Definitely my advisor and from the human perspective because he
told me to not give up, but also from the practical perspective
of teaching me how to do research and how to write papers
and how to go about the process of starting with the—a
particular question, finding out what the literature says about
it, and then kind of moving forward.
I think one thing that stuck out to me is how entrepreneurial it
is from the sense that you are running a lab with people and
you have to manage personalities and your ideas and your
direction. And I have a—one of my really good friends, he's an
entrepreneur and he always said, "Well, I could never do that,"
because he felt like he would be so trapped and boxed in. And so
once I went further and I saw the people running labs, I was
like, "Wow. He—this would be great for him if he had actually
pursued it," but I don't think people think about it that way
from the outside.
My laptop.
In the car, I listen to a lot of NPR, but when I work out I
listen to a lot of JayZ.