School of Computing Welcomes 11 New Faculty Members
The School of Computing is delighted to announce that eleven new faculty members have joined the School at the beginning of the 2022-23 academic year. The accomplished group of renowned scholars covers a breadth of research areas across the school. “The new faculty bring research expertise that strengthen existing and emerging areas in computing and will make it possible to enhance our undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Just this semester, we have introduced courses in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data science, graphics and theory,” says Director Mary Hall.
Daniel Brown
Assistant Professor
Robotics
Daniel Brown joined the Robotics Center and the School of Com-puting after completing a postdoc at UC Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UT Austin in 2020. His research focuses on helping robots to safely and efficiently interact with and learn from humans. In particular, he is interested imitation learning, preference learning, and human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning and has worked on applications in manipulation, autonomous driv-ing, multi-robot swarming, and assistive robotics.
Shireen Elhabian
Associate Professor
Image Analysis
Statistical Machine Learning
Shireen Elhabian has established her research program around biomedical problems that entail collaborating with scientists and domain experts of different disciplines and backgrounds to conduct interdisciplinary research projects at the intersection of image anal-ysis and statistical machine learning. Her long-term goal is to accel-erate the adoption and increase the clinical utility of machine-learn-ing-based image analysis systems that mitigate critical bottlenecks in attaining an expert-level understanding of the complexities of imaging data and have a broad impact in a range of clinical and biomedical research disciplines. Dr. Elhabian has been establishing foundational methods to solve inverse problems in image analy-sis and translating these methods to application domains through robust, flexible, and usable open-source software packages.
Nabil Makarem
Assistant Professor, Lecturer
Internet of Things
Nabil Makarem received his Master’s degree from the Lebanese American University in 2014 and his PhD degree in Computer Sci-ence from Sorbonne University in 2021. His current research area is the Internet of Things, with an emphasis on performance evalua-tion and improving congestion control mechanisms in IoT Networks. Nabil has worked in several universities and corporations, hold-ing different positions such as System and Network Engineer, IT Manager, and Lecturer. He has been teaching in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the American University of Beirut since 2019.
Anton Burtsev
Assistant Professor
Operating Systems
Anton Burtsev is a systems researcher whose work explores design and architecture of operating systems in the age of targeted security attacks, heterogeneous hardware, and datacenter-scale computing. Burtsev’s research spans topics of programming language safety and its impact on security and reliability, hardware support for isolation, and operating system support for disaggregat-ed heterogeneous datacenters. Burtsev received his PhD from the University of Utah, and spent six years as a faculty at the University of California, Irvine.
Kate Isaacs
Associate Professor
Data Visualization
High Performance Computing
Kate Isaacs is an Associate Professor in the School of Comput-ing and SCI Institute. Her research is at the intersection of data visualization and computing systems. She develops new methods of representing complex computing processes for exploration and analysis of their behavior, with applications to high performance computing, data science, and program analysis. She received a Department of Energy Early Career Research Program award in 2021 for research on visualizing program behavior in high perfor-mance computing contexts and a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2019 for visualizing networks derived from computing systems. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Davis. Prior to joining the Univer-sity of Utah, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona.
Ana Marasovic
Assistant Professor
Natural Language Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Ana Marasović received her Ph.D. from Heidelberg University. Be-fore joining University of Utah, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) and at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. Her primary research interests are at the confluence of natural language processing (NLP), multimodality, and explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), with a focus on building trustworthy and intuitive language technology.
Stefan Nagy
Assistant Professor
Computer Security and Systems
Stefan Nagy joined the School of Computing as an Assistant Professor. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 2022, and his Bachelor’s from The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016. His research interests broadly span security, software, and systems. Some topics he actively works in are software testing, binary analysis, and vulnerability triage. He is especially interested in making efficient and effective quality assur-ance possible for today’s closed-source, complex, and otherwise challenging software and systems.
Prashant Pandey
Assistant Professor
Data Structures and Algorithms
Prashant Pandey’s goal as a researcher is to advance the theory and practice of resource-efficient data structures and employ them to democratize complex and large-scale data analyses. He designs and builds tools for large-scale data management problems across computational biology, stream processing, and storage. He is also the main contributor and maintainer of multiple open-source software tools that are used by hundreds of users across academia and industry. Before joining SoC at the University of Utah, Pandey was a Research Scientist at VMware Research. He did postdocs at University of California Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stony Brook Univer-sity in December 2018.
Paul Rosen
Associate Professor
Visualization Computational Geometry
Paul Rosen has joined the University of Utah’s School of Com-puting as an associate professor. Dr. Rosen joins the School of Computing from the University of South Florida Department of Computer Science and Engineering, where he was an associate professor. Dr. Rosen received his Ph.D. from the Computer Sci-ence Department of Purdue University in 2010. In his research, Dr. Rosen studies approaches to improving the efficacy of visualization tools by utilizing a mix of human-centered design and geometry- and topology-based methods to extract and emphasize important data features in the context of many data types, including scalar and vector fields, multidimensional data, and graphs.
Haitao Wang
Associate Professor
Computational Geometry Theoretical
Computer Science
Haitao Wang joined the School of Computing as an associate professor in August 2022. Before that he taught at Utah State Uni-versity from 2012 to 2022. He received a Ph.D degree in Computer Science from University of Notre Dame in 2010 and stayed there for two more years as a research assistant professor. His research is mainly on algorithms, computational geometry, and theoretical computer science.
Yin Yang
Associate Professor
Computer Graphics
Yin Yang received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in 2013. He was a faculty member at Clemson University before joining the U. His research focus on Physical simulation and ap-plied computing in Graphics, Animation, Robotics, Vision, Machine Learning, Visualization, and Medical applications.
Vermont Researchers Use POWDER for Unique Testing
Researchers from the University of Vermont visited Utah recently to utilize the University of Utah’s POWDER wireless communications testbed for experiments involving a new tool that helps contractors detect objects underground.
This new ground-penetrating radar system, being developed by University of Vermont mechanical engineering professor Dryver Huston and his team, is capable of looking underground about six to seven feet to detect obstacles such as electric lines, natural gas lines or water tanks. This device can help contractors locate underground utilities while digging during construction.
Developing 5G Tech for the Government
A team led by University of Utah computer science researchers is one of 16 multidisciplinary groups selected nationwide for the first phase of a new convergence research track to develop advanced 5G communications technologies for the U.S. military, federal government and infrastructure operators.
These 16 teams, selected by the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, are part of Phase 1 of the Convergence Accelerator’s “Securely Operating Through 5G Infrastructure” track. For the next nine months, each team will develop its idea into a proof of concept, identify new team members and partners, and participate in the Convergence Accelerator innovation curriculum, according to the NSF. At the end of Phase 1, the teams will participate in a formal Phase 2 proposal and pitch.
Reaching Out to Students in Crisis
For many students, the college experience can be unbearably stressful. Academic pressure, separation from the family and a sense of vulnerability can all lead to a mental-health crisis. And for this generation of young adults, they’ve also had to contend with a stifling once-in-a-century pandemic.
To help students better understand these mounting pressures and how to deal with them, the University of Utah’s College of Engineering, College of Law and the University Counseling Center are hosting a talk with Salt Lake City-based author and mental wellness advocate, Lark Dean Galley, whose own 19-year-old son died by suicide in 2019.
Lab Safety Day 2022
At the University of Utah’s College of Engineering, lab safety is a priority. To increase awareness of university safety policies, the college is hosting its first annual “Lab Safety Day” for faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students.
This free special event will be held Friday, Sept. 2, from 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. in the Warnock Engineering Building (WEB). Click here to register.
Parashar Named Presidential Professor
School of Computing professor Manish Parashar, who is the director of the University of Utah’s Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, was recently named Presidential Professor.
Van der Merwe receives U Research Award
Congratulations to University of Utah School of Computing professor Jacobus (Kobus) Van der Merwe, who is one of six U faculty to receive this year’s Distinguished Research Award from the Office of the Vice President for Research.
Vivek Gupta receives prestigious Bloomberg Fellowship
Vivek Gupta, a PhD student working with Vivek Srikumar was selected as a recipient of the 2021-2022 Bloomberg Data Science Ph.D. Fellowship. Vivek will receive financial and professional support to pursue his research interests over the course of the academic year as he work towards the completion of his doctoral degree. He was one of 9 students selected this year.
The fellowship program is an extension of Bloomberg’s Data Science Research Grant Program, which has promoted relationship building between the company and academic researchers around the world in the fields broadly construed as AI, such as machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval (IR), recommender systems, time series analyses, and optimization. Working with the company’s CTO Office, more than 50 data scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI researchers participated in the review of more than 100 fellowship applications this year. They selected recipients on the basis of their outstanding proposals and academic references. Each of this year’s Fellows displayed exceptional novelty in their fields and delivered proposals of relevance to Bloomberg with significant business potential.
More details at the Bloomberg official blog post- https://www.techatbloomberg.com/blog/announcing-bloomberg-data-science-ph-d-fellowship-winners-2021-2022.
SOC Student receives Women in Tech Award
Congratulations to University of Utah School of Computing student Anna Bell, who received the student 2021 Women Tech Award from the Women Tech Council (WTC).
SoC Faculty Receive DOE/ASCR X-Stack Award
University of Utah School of Computing professor Ganesh Gopalakrishnan and assistant professor Pavel Panchekha have received one of the five DOE/ASCR X-Stack awards from the U.S. Department of Energy to adapt scientific software for next-generation high-performance computing (HPC) systems.