Volgenau School alumnus Abdur Chowdhury isn't trying to change the world. He is trying to change the technology and allow the world to change itself.
Chowdhry's resume reads like a Computer Science major's fantasy career path: chief architect at AOL and co-founder of Summize a search engine with the ability to crawl through listings identifying hot reviews and popular products found on blogs, YouTube, etc., and provide summaries and ratings. In 2008, Summize merged with a small start-up, Twitter. Chowdhury became the new company's chief scientist building the Search, Analytics and User Discover teams.
In a short time–as short as a tweet–Twitter transformed the social media landscape from the most intimate to the international. But what makes this Mason alumnus a technology leader goes beyond his CS education and business skills. Chowdhury says, "I see the world as it could be, and I believe you should study technology to make the world a better place."
Chowdhury earned his BS and MS degrees at Mason and his PhD from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Mason offered a solid CS program in a great location also close to home, and for Chowdhury, close to his girlfriend, who is now his wife. He enjoyed his studies and research and after completing his PhD taught for a while at Georgetown University.
Chowdhury's not a self-promoter. He wants his work and his accomplishments to speak for themselves. He said that the idea for Summize was based on a research idea that took off – the need to improve information retrieval and review. When the companies merged, Summize had five employees and Twitter had fifteen. The new company built so much momentum so fast some weeks they were realizing 100 percent growth. "Twitter was a place where everything you thought about was challenged. I loved the idea of thoughts flowing into real-time."
Chowdhury urges newly minted CS majors to think beyond their first jobs and to look at how they can apply their knowledge to something they love their entire career to do something powerful.
As for his next big technology product, the tech press is full of rumors of a stealth start-up called Pushd. Chowdhury says, "I could tell you all about it but it's most likely going to change." We'll have to wait and see. Hold on to your phone, most likely the news will come in the form of a tweet—or will it?
A version of this story by Sharon Ritchey was published in the Department of Computer Science 2014 Alumni News.