Nicholas Asker
Software Engineer
Founding Engineer, Canine Cyber
MS in Computer Science, Columbia University

I founded the software company Canine Cyber after graduating with an MS in Computer Science from Columbia University in May 2024. In addition to my background developing production-level code, I have four years of professional experience in cybersecurity and IT consulting and hold multiple computer-security certifications, including CISSP. I studied economics and philosophy for my bachelor's at Brown University.

As the founding engineer at Canine Cyber, I lead all full-stack development projects and day-to-day business operations. In particular, I identify specific market needs for software products related to digital security, plan out their technical implementations, and then program, test, deploy, and maintain them. For example, growl – available on the Chrome Web Store as an extension – automatically flags and "defangs" suspicious web pages, helping protect users from phishing, fraud, and other digital scams.

My first exposure to coding came while I was a cybersecurity consultant (2017 - 2021), where I had the opportunity to pick up Python. I felt great joy learning to program for the first time and suddenly realized how much constructive power a programmer has – literally at their fingertips – with the capacity to create highly useful and beautiful things through code. So, I committed to going back to school to study computer science—to build a firm engineering foundation and pivot my career into something I loved.

The first half of my graduate program consisted of fundamental coursework in data structures, algorithms, systems programming, and mathematics. Through this portion of the program, I became a proficient programmer in C, Python, and Java and developed strong problem-solving skills. In the latter half, I shifted focus to topics in AI, including natural language processing (NLP), language generation, computer vision, and robotic learning. I conducted research in these areas, writing two academic papers:

• TasteRank: Personalized Image Search and Recommendation [Paper]

• Whiteboard then Code: Refining Code Generation via Iterative Automatic Feedback from Peer LLMs [Paper]

While back in school, I repeatedly put my classroom knowledge to the test as a software developer. In 2022, I was a researcher in an applied physics research group at Columbia, building programs supporting the professor’s high-tech lab. Then in 2024, coinciding with my graduation and the launch of Canine Cyber, I was an AI Software Engineering Intern at Qualitest. I developed back-end web and database services for an AI platform on a full-stack software development team, implementing high-priority requirements, including functionality to ingest and process Excel spreadsheets.

At present, I am focused on building good software and applying machine learning and AI to the field of computer security.