Purdue Computer Science Welcomes New Faculty
09-03-2019
The Department of Computer Science is delighted to welcome five new faculty members for the 2019 fall semester: Antonia Bianchi, Berkay Celik, Changhee Jung, Kent Quanrud, and Dave Tian. Bedrich Benes, previously in computer science by courtesy, will also join the department in a joint position with Purdue Polytechnic Institute.
The new faculty will join the department during a large-scale hiring effort across key strategic areas in the College of Science. In addition to those starting this fall, Jianzhu Ma will join the faculty in the departments of computer science and biochemistry in January of 2020.
In the fall 2020 semester, the department will also be joined by Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, Pan Li, and Alex Psomas - all are completing post-doc positions for 2019-2020. In May of 2020, Ryan Newton will join the department of computer science jointly with the school of electrical and computer engineering. In August of 2020, Hatef Monajemi will also have a joint faculty position with the departments of computer science and statistics.
In all, twelve new faculty members will be joining Purdue Computer Science as an effort of the 2019 faculty hiring effort. "We are excited to welcome our new faculty colleagues whose expertise strengthens or complements our department's current research and education programs,” said Dongyan Xu, Department Head and Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science.
Antonio Bianchi completed his PhD in computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interest is in the area of computer security and he is focused on the fields of mobile devices, binary analysis, and IoT/embedded devices security. Specifically, his work is in identifying novel security issues in mobile devices and apps, and applying both static and dynamic analysis techniques to detect vulnerable and malicious code automatically.His future research will focus on developing new methods to analyze compiled binary code, overcoming scalability and applicability, and affecting current techniques.
Berkay Celik earned his PhD in computer science and engineering from Penn State University. His research investigates the design and evaluation of security for software and systems, specifically on emerging computing platforms and the complex environments in which they operate. Through systems design and program analysis, his research seeks to improve security and privacy guarantees in commodity computer systems. His future research topics will focus on automated code generation - specifically fault tolerant IoT systems and context-aware security through machine learning.
Changhee Jung joins the Purdue CS faculty as an associate professor. He received his PhD in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests are in compilers and computer architecture, with an emphasis on performance, reliability, and security. He has developed program analysis and microarchitecture optimization techniques for soft error resilience, concurrency bug detection, and system security such as memory safety and Linux kernel permission check. His current research focuses on speculative intermittent computation and nonvolatile memory crash consistency. His research evaluates current practices, considered norms in the literature, and develops alternative designs by leveraging compiler-architecture integration and repurposes existing hardware features.
Kent Quanrud received his PhD in computer science from University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. His research interests combine techniques from randomized algorithms, approximation algorithms, combinatorial optimization, convex analysis and continuous optimization, data structures, and discrete geometry. He incorporates advanced techniques as spectral graph theory, random matrix theory, and sketching. Additionally, he has research interests in constrained submodular maximization in various big data models of computation. Currently, he works with network flow/design, clustering, and matchings - all of which are fundamental and for which many state-of-the-art algorithms are not scalable.
Dave Tian earned his PhD in computer science from the University of Florida. His research addresses the emerging threats presented by embedded systems and investigates the design and implementation of new security systems. His research philosophy focuses on finding problems in practice and solving them by applying fundamental concepts of secure system design and practical deployment. His current research involves embedded systems security and addresses the emerging threats of these trust-by-default peripheral devices by building defense solutions within the operating system - covering USB, Bluetooth, and NFC. In trusted computing research, he explores novel uses of hardware trust anchors to solve practical security issues, design new security systems, and build infrastructures.
Writer: Emily Kinsell, 765-494-0669, emily@purdue.edu, @emilykinsell