Episode 1: From A Country That No Longer Exists

Immigration stories from two Professors of Computer Science, and 
a Distinguished Technologist in Tech Industry.

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Episode Guide

In this Episode: Immigration stories from two Professors of Computer Science, and a Distinguished Technologist in Tech Industry. Featuring: Nenad Medvidovic (IEEE Fellow, Professor at USC), Jelena Mirkovic (Research Professor at USC), and Dejan Milojicic (IEEE Fellow, Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs). All three narrators were immigrants from Yugoslavia in the late 20th century.

The title phrase of this episode – “A Country That No Longer Exists” – is taken from a phrase used by one of our three narrators, Nenad Medvidovic, during his interview.

• h.mm.ss: Segment Info (Index)
• 0.00.00: Voices in this Episode.
• 0.02.45: What is this episode about?
• 0.07.55: Was Yugoslavia communist, socialist, or capitalist? Yugoslav environment for education. Middle and High Schooling System in Yugoslavia.
• 0.14.37: How to get admitted to a University in Yugoslavia. Admission into Bachelors of Sciences program in CS/EE at University of Belgrade, the major university in Yugoslavia.
• 0.23.31: The Clash of Educational Cultures! An Exchange student in US High School and in a Bachelor of Sciences Program in a US University (Arizona State University).
• 0.32.37: First Encounters of the Computer Kind. First brush with programming and computers.
• 0.34.35: Parents and Upbringing.
• 0.39.46: The Yugoslav/Balkan Wars in the 1990s-2000s, and its effect on our three immigrant computer scientists.
• 0.50.35: Wisdom! Advice for everyone!
• 0.56.05: Wrap up.

Featured in this Episode

Three prominent and distinguished computer scientists spanning academia and industry, and spanning decades of immigration history in the late 20th century.

1. Nenad Medvidovic, Professor of Computer Science at USC.
   • IEEE Fellow and ACM Distinguished Scientist.
   • Research Areas: Leader in the Software Engineering research community, especially in premier International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
   • Immigrated in the late 1980s from Yugoslavia to the US for high school; stayed for BS, PhD, and career.
2. Jelena Mirkovic, Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at USC.
   • One of the leaders in DeterLab testbed for cybersecurity research.
   • Research Areas: Networking, Cybersecurity.
   • Immigrated in the late 1990s (during the Yugoslav Wars) to the US for PhD; stayed for career.
3. Dejan Milojicic, Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs.
   • IEEE Fellow and ACM Distinguished Scientist. 2021 Richard E. Merwin Award and Bronze medal for Distinguished Service.
   • Former President of IEEE Computer Society, and IEEE Division 8 Director.
   • Research Areas: Cloud, Middleware, Distributed Systems.
   • Immigrated in the early 1990s to Germany for PhD, then in the mid 1990s to the US for work/career.

Links

• US Department of State page on Yugoslavia
• US Department of State page on Serbia
• Wikipedia page on Yugoslavia
• Wikipedia page on Yugoslav Wars

Upcoming Episodes

This is the first episode of a 4-episode segment featuring prominent and distinguished Computer Scientists all of whom immigrated from a country that no longer exists, Yugoslavia.

Look for our next three episodes, featuring the full interviews with each of these narrators: Nenad Medvidovic (Episode 2), Jelena Mirkovic (Episode 3), and Dejan Milojicic (Episode 4).

• Credits
  • Music Credits for Podcast
  • The caption picture at top of page is the Belgrade skyline view from the west across the Sava River. Pic taken by Indy Gupta.
  • Thanks to Darko Marinov and Viveka Kudaligama for feedback on an early version of this episode.

The Immigrant Computer Scientists Podcast is available for free on your favorite devices & apps: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and many more!