hi there!

I’m Sam, a computer scientist and PhD candidate currently at the University of Oklahoma. My academic interests are centred around database management, quantum computing, machine learning, and distributed systems. I am proficient in Python, SQL, C, C++, R, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, and Java. I have the right to work without sponsorship in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

I am currently working under my PhD advisor, Dr Le Gruenwald, as a Graduate Research Assistant.

curriculum vitae

Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science, 2025–present

• University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, United States
• Dissertation topic: quantum computing for database index selection
• Currently in progress

Master of Science in Computer Science, 2024

• University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, United States
• GPA: 4.00/4.00
• Exit exam project: ‘Design and analysis of distributed memory calculations: collective communications and the Scalable Universal Matrix Multiplication Algorithm’

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, 2020–2023

• University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, United States
• Graduated with distinction (GPA: 3.71/4.00)
• Minor in Mathematics

publications

• Sam Bird, Le Gruenwald, and Sven Groppe, “A Divergent Index Tuning Advisor Using Quantum Machine Learning for Distributed Databases”, to appear in 2026 IEEE 42nd International Conference on Data Engineering Workshops (ICDEW), Montreal, Canada, 4-8 May 2026.

projects

I have completed some programming projects throughout my bachelor’s and master’s degrees:

• mysql-server is a modification to the base MySQL server to add support for a few fulltext indexing methods. MySQL already supports these, but it was good to reimplement inverted indexes and suffix trees from scratch by extending the CSV engine. While very much a ‘proof of concept’, it was a fun challenge, though probably the trickiest project I’ve had to complete at university to date. The performance boost is significant, about 10x faster than a stock InnoDB lookup, but this solution would struggle to scale.
• collectives was my first research project for my master’s degree. It examined how seven commonly used collective communication operations, implemented in three different ways, compared against each other across a range of input sizes. Effectively, it was an examination of how quickly different implementations performed on OU’s Schooner supercomputer, while also enhancing my programming skills in a distributed memory environment.
• summa was my final research project for my master’s degree. It is an implementation of the Scalable Universal Matrix Multiplication Algorithm on OU’s Schooner supercomputer, and was useful for benchmarking its performance against a naïve implementation of matrix multiplication.

contact me

I have two email addresses:

• sam.bird AT ou DOT edu for things related to academics
• sam AT sambird DOT org will work for everything else

Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.