Hi! I'm a second-year PhD student in Computing and Mathematical Sciences at Caltech, advised by Pietro Perona. My drive to protect the natural world led me to graduate school at Caltech. My interests include leveraging machine learning and computer vision techniques to solve conservation and sustainability problems. I hope to focus my research on expanding on multi-modal methods (i.e. vision, audio, etc.) to enable ecological protective measures to be put into place. Prior to Caltech, I worked as a software engineer for six years. My experiences have sharpened my appreciation for interdisciplinary perspective and the real world impact of precise computational techniques.

Work Experience

Check my linkedin for a more detailed list

2017-2021, Amazon
Software Development Engineer With a team of roughly 4 other developers, I developed a cross-platform C++ music player aimed to improve customers’ listening experiences. Playback library was developed to integrate with iOS, Android, Desktop (Mac/PC), Amazon Fire, and more.

2015-2017, NASA JPL
Engineering Applications Software Engineer Worked with the Cyber Defense Engineering and Research Group on a tool used to analyze the cybersecurity landscape of mission software systems (C++, Python) Generated pairwise features from website forum metadata on the dark web to boost precision of user-pair identification. This work was leveraged to identify human traffickers (Python)

Publications

This includes some of my recent publications. Check Google Scholar for a more complete list

Kay, Justin and Kulits, Peter and Stathatos, Suzanne and Deng, Siqi and Young, Erik and Beery, Sara and Van Horn, Grant and Perona, Pietro. The Caltech Fish Counting Dataset: A Benchmark for Multiple-Object Tracking and Counting, European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2022.

Stathatos, Suzanne, Asitang Mishra, Chris A. Mattmann. Cyber Persona Identification via Indirect Feature Analysis, WSDM 2018

Pecharich, Jeremy, Suzanne Stathatos, Brian Wright, Arun Viswanathan, Kymie Tan. Mission-Centric Cyber Security Assessment of Critical Systems, AIAA 2016

Won, A.S., Bailenson, J.N., Stathatos, S.C. et al. Automatically Detected Nonverbal Behavior Predicts Creativity in Collaborating Dyads. J Nonverbal Behav 38, 389–408 (2014)

Datasets

Caltech Fish Counting Dataset 2022

Talks

Teaching

Education

PhD Computational and Mathematical Sciences, Caltech, 2021-present

M.S, Computer Science, Stanford, 2015

B.A. History, Stanford, 2013



Relevant Classes

Caltech

Applied Math
  • CS157: Statistical Inference
  • CMS122: Mathematical Optimization
  • CMS117: Probability and Random Processes
  • CMS107: Linear Analysis with Applications
  • CMS108a: Classical Analysis
Computer Science
  • CS179: GPU Programming
  • CS148: Selected Topics in Computational Vision
  • CMS155: Machine Learning and Data Mining
  • CMS144: Networks: Structure and Economics
  • CMS139: Analysis and Design of Algorithms

Stanford

  • CS240: Advanced Topics in Operating Systems
  • CS255: Introduction to Cryptography
  • CS245: Database Systems Principles
  • CS144: Distributed Systems
  • CS229: Machine Learning
  • CS244: Advanced Topics in Networking
  • CS155: Computer and Network Security
  • CS140: Operating Systems and Systems Programming
  • CS148: Introduction to Computer Graphics and Imaging
  • CS144: Introduction to Computer Networking (i.e. TCP, IP, etc)
  • CS142: Web Applications
  • CS109: Introduction to Probability for Computer Scientists
  • CS110: Principles of Computer Systems
  • CS147: Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction Design

Honors and Awards

  • Phi Beta Kappa

Policy

I am a member of the Pacific Council. There, I get to understand and connect with policy experts to help turn my research into reality, as I hope to ultimately implement sweeping advances in wildlife conservation.

Fun

As you can see from my photo up top, I enjoy any excursion outside - hiking, camping, mountaineering (favorite mountain is Mount Shasta).

In college, I was a history major focusing on wartime technology advancements. For my senior capstone project, I wrote about how the Claude Chappe semaphore, a precursor to the telescope, affected and was influenced by the political and socioeconomic landscape in which it arose.