André and Markelle Rösti: Match Made in… ICS!
André Rösti and Markelle Kelly, computer science Ph.D. candidates at UC Irvine, got married on December 6, 2024.
“We actually both had conferences to attend right after the wedding!” says Markelle. They tied the knot in a civil ceremony on a Friday afternoon, and the next Monday she left for Vancouver, where she presented a paper on benchmark data repositories at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). On Tuesday, her husband was on his way to Hawaii for the Computer Security Applications Conference, where he presented work on designing a survivable system and earned the Best Paper Award.
Such is the life of romance for these two Ph.D. candidates in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). “We call it our separate honeymoon,” says André. “Don’t feel too bad for us though. We’ll have a proper wedding celebration and honeymoon in Europe this summer!”
Their ICS research might have kept them apart their first week of marriage, but ICS is also what brought them together.
Inseparable in ICS
“We both started at UCI in September 2020 — not exactly an easy time to meet people, given the global pandemic,” says Markelle. Yet she was able to make a few friends through virtual social events organized by graduate student housing. “One of these friends invited me to a barbecue in Huntington Beach, where I met André for the first time. We hit it off right away!”
The two quickly realized that they were taking some of the same computer science classes in ICS. “So we worked on homework assignments and projects together as an excuse to spend more time with one another,” she says. “We’ve been pretty inseparable ever since!”
Over the last four years, they have supported each other while working on their research and dissertations. “It’s great to have someone on your side who really understands this process: things like the stress of submitting a paper, or the doubts you have along the way,” says André. “When one of us has a big deadline, the other can really support them, providing meals, coffee, and encouragement.”
André is primarily researching systems software, and, as an intern at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), he contributed to compiler development and application mapping for artificial intelligence accelerators. He was also an intern at Embotech and ZF Friedrichshafen, where he worked on numerical optimization and sensor validation in the autonomous driving sphere.
Markelle’s research interests include the holistic evaluation of machine learning models as well as methods for understanding and improving human-AI collaboration. She has previously interned with eBay and Apple, working on tools and processes for detecting and characterizing undesirable behaviors in large language models.
“Luckily, we’re in different niches of computer science, so it never feels like we’re competing with each other,” she says. “It’s the ‘sweet spot’ in that we still understand enough of the other’s field to be able to really talk about our research.”
Happily Ever After
What comes after ICS? Both plan to graduate this spring, and they’re coordinating their job searches to end up in the same city. “We are focusing on jobs in industry in the Boulder, Colorado area, where I interned the last two summers,” says André, “so hopefully there’s lots of great cycling, hiking, and skiing in our future!”
With UCI doubling as educator and matchmaker, their future seems bright. “A Ph.D. program can be a great opportunity to meet someone like-minded, and there’s nothing like doing classes or projects together to really bond,” says Markelle. “You just never know when you will meet the right person!”
— Shani Murray