{"id":7091,"date":"2024-12-19T19:02:36","date_gmt":"2024-12-20T02:02:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.boisestate.edu\/coen-cs\/?p=7091"},"modified":"2026-08-18T18:43:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T00:43:15","slug":"featured-student-dan-kondratyuk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.boisestate.edu\/coen-cs\/2024\/12\/19\/featured-student-dan-kondratyuk\/","title":{"rendered":"Featured Student: Dan Kondratyuk"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">From Boise to Google and beyond, meet Dan Kondratyuk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"576\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/www.boisestate.edu\/coen-cs\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/567\/2024\/12\/20170505_154354-576x1024.jpg\" alt=\"A man smiles and stands to the left of a College of Engineering sign from Boise State University\" class=\"wp-image-7092\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Dan Kondratyuk stands beside a Boise State University College of Engineering banner.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-life-after-boise-state-university\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Life After Boise State University<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In 2017, Dan graduated from Boise State University with a Bachelor&#8217;s in Computer Science (CS). Since then, he studied abroad and received a Erasmus Mundus Joint Master&#8217;s degree in Computational Linguistics at Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic) and Saarland University (Saarbrucken, Germany) in 2019. He then joined Google&#8217;s AI Residency program, working on Machine Learning research such as training <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2103.11511\">Mobile Video Networks<\/a>, before transitioning to a full-time role. During his four years at Google, Dan contributed to <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2305.06324\">Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts models<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.research.google\/videopoet\/\">Large Language Models for Video Generation<\/a>. Most recently, in March 2024, he joined Luma AI as a Research Scientist, where he has developed many features behind <a href=\"https:\/\/lumalabs.ai\/dream-machine\">Dream Machine<\/a>, a creative partner to build multimedia creations through multimodal generative image and video models.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" src=\"https:\/\/www.boisestate.edu\/coen-cs\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/567\/2024\/12\/20181031_123631-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"A selfie of a man in a patterned shirt with a sign behind him reading Welcome to EMNLP 2018!\" class=\"wp-image-7093\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-building-a-strong-foundation\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Building a Strong Foundation<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Dan shared that his time in Boise State&#8217;s CS program provided him a strong foundation in software engineering. He continues to apply many of the principles he learned, including <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hofstadter%27s_law\">Hofstadter&#8217;s Law<\/a>: &#8220;It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter&#8217;s Law.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" src=\"https:\/\/www.boisestate.edu\/coen-cs\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/567\/2024\/12\/20190619_122045-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"A selfie of a man smiling in a small sunhat with a city of tan-colored rooftops behind him\" class=\"wp-image-7094\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-choosing-boise-state-s-cs-program\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Choosing Boise State&#8217;s CS Program<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Dan reflected on his early fascination with computers and wanted to build exciting projects with them, this sparked his love for programming. Initially, he chose Boise State because he wanted to study somewhere close to his family. However, his motivation changed. &#8220;I quickly realized that the CS department at Boise State was quite excellent, providing me ample fuel to indulge my fascinations with technology.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" src=\"https:\/\/www.boisestate.edu\/coen-cs\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/567\/2024\/12\/20231214_164827-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"A man standing next to a Google Research poster with information like text, graphics, and charts\" class=\"wp-image-7095\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Dan Kondratyuk standing to the right of a Google Research poster titled &#8220;Alternating Gradient Descent and Mixture-of-Experts for integrated Multimodal Perception.&#8221;.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-learning-at-boise-state-university\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Learning at Boise State University<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Dan found the classes to be &#8220;rigorous and challenging, yet enjoyable and enlightening.&#8221; He particularly appreciated learning from and engaging with professors, who shared a deep passion for their various subfields within computer science. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" src=\"https:\/\/www.boisestate.edu\/coen-cs\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/567\/2024\/12\/20240322_100246-1024x768.jpg\" alt=\"A laptop with a glass trophy that has illustrations of hands and a lightbulb next to a man's badge\" class=\"wp-image-7096\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">A trophy from Perception + Friends Hackathon for Dan Kondratyuk labeling him as <em>2023 Best Overall<\/em>. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-making-the-most-of-extracurricular-opportunities\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Making the Most of Extracurricular Opportunities<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Dan credits one of his best decisions was to reach out to professors in the CS department for an extracurricular project. There he worked with Casey Kennington on <a href=\"https:\/\/helloaugi.com\/\">Hello Augi<\/a>, a personal assistant designed to help catalog and retrieve details about personal daily activities. This project set the stage for his journey into AI development, guiding him towards Machine Learning and ultimately helping lead him to become a researcher in the Generative Video AI space, where he creates innovative interactions with video content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/www.boisestate.edu\/coen-cs\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/567\/2024\/12\/IMG_20190813_182114_641-1024x1024.jpg\" alt=\"A selfie of a man wearing a funny hat that says &quot;Noogler&quot; while standing left of a Google building\" class=\"wp-image-7097\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<h2 id=\"h-advice-for-students\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Advice for Students<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Dan advises students to find a subject that fascinates them and pushes them to learn as much as possible about the subject. &#8220;Never settle for the bare minimum work, always find ways to expand your knowledge and experience, especially from people (especially professors!) who are experts in that area.&#8221; Passion, he believes, can fuel remarkable achievements if persisted long enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Boise to Google and beyond, meet Dan Kondratyuk. Life After Boise State University In&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7092,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3589,4003],"tags":[4014,4010,4034],"class_list":["post-7091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-featured-stories","tag-college-of-engineering","tag-computer-science","tag-student"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.2 (Yoast SEO v28.2) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Featured Student: Dan Kondratyuk - Computer Science<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.boisestate.edu\/coen-cs\/2024\/12\/19\/featured-student-dan-kondratyuk\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Featured Student: Dan Kondratyuk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From Boise to Google and beyond, meet Dan Kondratyuk. 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