Assistant Professor Rajiv Khanna is newest faculty member to join Purdue Computer Science
01-13-2022
New faculty at the Department of Computer Science, top row from l to r: Steve Hanneke, Rajiv Khanna, Anuran Makur, Ahmed Qureshi, bottom row from l to r: Paul Valiant, Raymond Yeh, Ruqi Zhang & Tianyi Zhang.
For the spring 2022 semester, Assistant Professor Rajiv Khanna joins the faculty in the Department of Computer Science. He is part of the 2021 hiring effort which resulted in eight new faculty members including; Steve Hanneke, Anuran Makur, Ahmed Qureshi, Paul Valiant and Tianyi Zhang, who began in the fall 2021 semester. Additional faculty members, Raymond Yeh and Ruqi Zhang, will join in the fall of 2022.
The Department of Computer Science has successfully hired 36 new faculty members in the past years. This is part of a large-scale hiring effort across key strategic areas in computer and data science in the College of Science at Purdue University.
Spring 2022
Rajiv Khanna joins the Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor. Most recently he was a visiting faculty researcher at Google. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the Foundations of Data Analytics Institute at University of California, Berkeley. In 2018, he was a research fellow in the Foundations of Data Science program at the Simons Institute. Khanna earned his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018. His research interests span various subfields of machine learning including optimization, theory and interpretability, specifically in theory and practical viewpoints of greedy algorithms.
Fall 2021
Steve Hanneke joins the Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor. Previously he was a research assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute of Chicago. From 2012-2018 he was an independent scientist working at Princeton University. Additionally, he was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University from 2009 to 2012. In 2009, Hanneke completed his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. He covers topics in statistical learning theory, particularly statistical analysis of machine learning.
Anuran Makur earned his ScD from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at MIT. His research interests include theory of machine learning, combinatorial statistics, and information theory and statistical inference. He joins the department as an assistant professor.
Ahmed Qureshi received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of California, San Diego in 2021. He joins the Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor and directs the Cognitive Robot Autonomy and Learning (CoRAL) Laboratory. His research is at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Paul Valiant joins the Department of Computer Science as an associate professor. He was a Von Neumann Fellow at Princeton University from 2020-2021 and was previously an assistant professor at Brown University. He completed an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of California, Berkley in 2012. Prior to that, he completed a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from MIT in 2008. His research interests lie in algorithms and complexity, machine learning, fluid dynamics, and the brain.
Tianyi Zhang earned his PhD in Computer Science in 2019 from the University of California, Los Angeles. He joins the department as an assistant professor. His research interests include software engineering, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University in 2020.