Purdue CS Welcomes Six New Faculty Members

08-18-2015

Writer(s): Jesica E. Hollinger

The CS Department welcomes six new assistant professors: Elias Bareinboim, Aniket Kate, Bruno Ribeiro, Hemanta Maji, Jean Honorio, and Jeremiah Blocki.

All of the professors will be joining the faculty in the fall of 2015, except Jeremiah Blocki, who will be joining the faculty in the fall of 2016.

The faculty joins the three new assistant professors, who were recently hired and began teaching in the fall of 2014, making a total of nine new hires in less than two years. Plans include hiring an additional 10 professors, before the expansion concludes.

This expansion (Strengthening Computer Science) is part of the Purdue Moves initiative, which will result in an across-the-board growth of CS by nearly 30%. Purdue President Mitch Daniels launched the effort in 2013 with a goal of placing Purdue among the premier academic institutions, investing in and expanding the areas of STEM believed to have the greatest potential to change the world.

Elias earned his PhD from the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, working with Judea Pearl. His interests are in causal and counterfactual inferences and their applications. He is also broadly interested in artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, and philosophy of science. His doctoral thesis provides the first general framework for solving the generalizability problems in causal inference, which has applications across all the empirical sciences. His recognitions include the Dan David Prize Scholarship, the Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Award, the Outstanding Paper Award at the 2014 Annual Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the Edward K. Rice Outstanding Graduate Student.

 

Before accepting his position at Purdue, Aniket was a junior faculty member at Saarland University in Germany, where he led the Cryptographic Systems Research Group within the Cluster of Excellence. Prior to joining Saarland, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Germany. He earned his PhD from the University of Waterloo, Canada in 2010 and his master’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) - Bombay, India in 2006. He is an applied cryptographer and a privacy researcher, and his research interests lie at the intersection of cryptography, and systems security research.

 

Bruno conducted his post-doc research at Carnegie Mellon and at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (UMASS). He earned his PhD from UMASS in 2010 and his M.Eng. and B.Sc. in computing from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. His central research interests are in big data and data science, particularly in the measurement, analysis, and forecasting of complex large-scale social and technological networks. This May, he was an invited speaker at the ICWSM Workshop for Modeling and Mining Temporal Interactions, and also a keynote speaker at the 7th Annual Workshop On Simplifying Complex Networks for Practitioners SIMPLEX'15 at WWW in Florence, Italy.

 

Hemanta conducted his post-doc research at the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles & Center for Encrypted Functionalities. He earned his PhD from theUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and his B-Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. Hemanta received the Computing Innovation Fellow sponsored by Computing Research Association in 2011 and 2012 and was a Center Fellow at the Center for Encrypted Functionalities in 2013 and 2014. His interests include Cryptography and Algorithms with special emphasis on Secure Computation and Information-theoretic Cryptography.

 

Jean previously worked as a post-doc associate for the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 2012. He earned his PhD in computer science from Stoney Brook University in New York and his MSc in computer science from George Washington University, Washington DC. His reserch focuses on developing computationally and statistically efficient algorithms, understanding their behaviour using concepts such as convergence, sample complexity, privacy, and designing new modeling paradigms such as models rooted in game theory. His theoretical and algorithmic work is directly motivated by, and contributes to, applications in political science (affiliation and affluence) neuroscience (brain disorders such as addiction), and genetics (diseases such as cancer).

 

Jeremiah will be joining the Purdue CS faculty in Fall 2016, leaving his post-doc research for the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Jeremiah earned his PhD at Carnegie Melon and was supported by a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. He also completed his undergraduate studies there, earning a double major in computer science and mathematics. His research interests include developing usable authentication protocols for humans. Jeremiah is a theoretical computer scientist who applies fundamental ideas from computer science to address practical problems in usable privacy and security.