M. Cameron Jones (PhD '10) will deliver the 2025 iSchool Convocation address on Sunday, May 18, from 1:30-3:00 p.m. at the Activities and Recreation Center. For those who would like to watch the ceremony online, live video will be available as well as archived for future viewing.
As a senior engineering manager at Google, Jones is doing work that helps more than a billion users worldwide find their way. He leads the Traffic & ETA team, which builds and maintains the machine learning models and real-time infrastructure to predict future road traffic conditions and provides accurate ETAs for driving navigation routes.
"I feel lucky to get to work on a product that so many people rely on and love," he said.
Prior to joining Google in 2010 as a software engineer, Jones worked at Yahoo! Research, where he studied online developer communities in the Yahoo! Developer Network.
Jones chose to pursue a PhD at the iSchool after connecting with several faculty members during his undergraduate studies at Illinois. He wanted to study how people and communities design, use, and appropriate information technologies to solve problems, and how evolving technical solutions reshape and redefine people's information needs. This has extended into his career, building Maps features that redefine how people discover, explore, and navigate the world.
As a manager, Jones often finds himself repeating the advice he received from Professors Michael Twidale and J. Stephen Downie when he was a student. Now, returning to the iSchool as a convocation speaker, Jones looks forward to finally donning our regalia, as he was not able to attend his own graduation.
"I've worked on dozens of projects at Google, written hundreds of thousands of lines of code, most of which have been deleted or rewritten by someone else. Technology is just a small part of what goes into building products, and the most durable things you build in your career are the relationships you make with your peers along the way," he shared.
Outside of his professional endeavors, Jones enjoys traveling with his wife, Jin Ha Lee (MS '02, PhD '08), and two daughters to visit family and experience different cultures and foods. He also enjoys playing video games and cooking at home.
In addition to earning his PhD from the iSchool, Jones holds a BS in mathematics and computer science from the University of Illinois.