Purdue Computer Science welcomes new faculty
09-10-2020
The Department of Computer Science is delighted to welcome six new faculty members for the 2020 fall semester: Kamyar Azizzandenesheli, Hisham Benotman, Tamal Dey, Pan Li, Hatef Monajemi, and Jianguo Wang.
The new faculty will join the department during a large-scale hiring effort across key strategic areas in the College of Science.
Six new faculty members will be joining Purdue Computer Science as an effort of the 2020 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 Sunil Prabhakar, Department Head and Professor of Computer Science.
Kamyar Azizzadenesheli completed his PhD at the University of California, Irvine. Prior to his start at Purdue Computer Science, Azizzadenesheli was at Caltech as a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Computing + Mathematical Sciences. Azizzadenesheli joins the faculty as an assistant professor. His research is in the area of machine learning theory and practice with the main focuses on spectral methods and reinforcement learning. He is broadly interested in graphical models, latent variable models, Big Data, and non-convex optimization problems.
Hisham Benotman completed his PhD in computer science at Portland State University.
His current research is focused on the area of exploratory search in which techniques from both Information Retrieval (IR) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) are used to provide interactive IR user interfaces. He is broadly interested in the area of databases and information retrieval, including the topics of digital libraries, social media, text mining, semantic web, and the World Wide Web. He joins the faculty as an assistant professor of practice.
Tamal Dey joins the department as a Professor of Computer Science. Before joining Purdue, he was a faculty at the Computer Science & Engineering department of the Ohio State University (1999--2020). Dey’s research area is Computational Geometry and Topology with applications to topological data analysis, geometric modeling, computer graphics, and mesh generation. He has co-authored two books: Curve and surface reconstruction: Algorithms with Mathematical Analysis published by Cambridge University Press and Delaunay Mesh Generation published by CRC Press. He has co-authored more than 200 scientific articles, Dey is an IEEE and ACM Fellow.
Pan Li completed his PhD in computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana – Champaign and his postdoc at with the SNAP group at Stanford University. His research focuses on machine learning techniques to process structured data (graphs, ranking data), optimization, computation, and applications with large-scale structured data. He joins the department as an assistant professor of computer science.
Hatef Monajemi most recently was a data science scholar at Stanford Data Science Initiative and a postdoctoral fellow in the department of Statistics. He received his PhD in Statistics from Stanford University in 2016 in the area of sparse sensing. Monajemi is a joint hire with the Department of Statistics. His research concerns massive computational experiments for scientific discovery, high-dimensional data analysis, deep learning, sparse reconstruction proglems, and mathematical theories of machine learning algorithms. He joins the faculty as an assistant professor of computer science.
Jianguo Wang earned his PhD in computer science at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to joining the faculty, he worked at Amazon Web Services on Amazon Aurora, a cloud-native distributed transactional SQL database. His research interests lie in database systems, particularly compression, indexing, distributed databases, storage-computer-memory disaggregation, serverless computing. He joins the faculty as an assistant professor of computer science.