 I think the environment here is really special. I think it's very supportive. Everything is set up to make sure that the students are succeeding. I mean, there's a lot of faculty here who are really at the top of their field, who are really well respected in their particular area, and they're all very focused on their students and on helping their students succeed. We care about the department as a whole. We collaborate. You know, it's a great environment. I think it's wonderful to be with a group of colleagues who spend time thinking about students, about research, and it's just wonderful. And Michigan's in a great place. I think we have great people working here. We're looking at great questions, questions of important society, and I think as a result we'll keep getting the funding we need to grow and the resources we need to grow, and I think we keep attracting great students. I came here because Michigan has a great combination of expertise in software systems, which is my research area, and it also has a really collegial atmosphere. The professors are great. They're extremely friendly and willing to help you out on your projects. And also the students are also very friendly too, and it's very rare to find that combination of technical expertise and a friendly welcoming atmosphere. What I tell my students to do is pick a problem that bothers you personally. Pick something that you want to fix, and that helps them bring their passion to the work. So for example, we've worked on things like protecting the secrecy and privacy of medical records. We've worked on reducing traffic jams, using sensors in vehicles, and trying to figure out how vehicles move through the roads. So picking problems that have a real practical relevance keeps me excited and keeps my students very excited. One of the things that we do here at Michigan is we create a nurturing collaborative environment such that students not only learn from a single faculty member, they learn from this community. I love working with students. I used to work in the industry, and they are the outcome of my work with software. Here, the outcome of my work are students. Great, successful people who are fully equipped to work in high-profile companies, startups, and top universities. People can come here to Michigan and pursue their dreams, and that's part of what graduate school is all about. It's not just coming and taking classes, it's actually pursuing the research you're really interested in, and that's what graduate school meant to me. So John Laird was my advisor as an undergraduate. He got me started on games research, which I didn't know at the time, but I ended up taking an internship at Microsoft Research, doing games development, and then even to today, I still interact with the games community because of that connection that he made for me. Some helped by setting me up with great internships with companies where essentially I ended up changing and picking a new PhD topic that turned out to be a very influential PhD topic that started a whole new area of research in data mining. What's special about Michigan is how you get such a wonderful diversity of things that they excel at. I think that the education I got at Michigan really set the stage for me to have a successful career. I pretty much knew all the time when I was little that I wanted to go into engineering of some sort with mathematics and electronics, and I certainly found that here at Michigan, and it was an amazing experience. And Arbor is a really livable city. I like the fact that I can get anywhere I want to go really easily with the buses or just driving a short distance. Everything's an easy reach. There's also a really wide range of sort of entertainment and cultural options, and yet with all of the green spaces in the parks, it doesn't feel too urban. So we came back and wrote a little proposal to the College of Engineering saying, you know, let us teach a seminar on robots, and by the way, we'd like a bunch of money to buy parts for robots and things like that. And lo and behold, they let us do that, and we got a bunch of other grad students, and within a few months, we had a bunch of robots running around the hall, so that was a lot of fun. Faculty here are pretty friendly, and they always open doors, so you can always go by knocking the door and say, oh, can I talk with you? And they're always very excited to talk about research. They like to talk about the kind of work they're doing, so they are very accessible to students. There is a lot of diversity among the advisors and the faculty here, so you can always find someone who can match your research interests. I had a great advisor and a great research group, and it made the large university small, and it was also a place where I could really explore my passion, which was computer design. There's a lot of groundbreaking research coming out of Michigan. My advisor does work addressing the problem of the world's aging population, and so I think it's great that we can apply artificial intelligence and computer science techniques to such problems. One of the things to think about in the computer science business is not just being fabulous at computing and computers, which Michigan is, but also thinking about coming to a place that's fabulous at physics or biology or medicine or health or going green in the future. It's all gonna be about computing plus something else going forward, and Michigan is just completely excellent at all of those kinds of things.