CICS Announces the Hiring of Five New Faculty in 2022
The Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at UMass Amherst announces the appointment of five new tenure-track faculty to increase capacity for its expanding academic and research programs.
“The hiring of these five outstanding researchers and educators demonstrates our college’s continued growth in core and emerging research areas including quantum information systems, robotics, computer vision, and machine learning,” said Laura Haas, dean of CICS. “I look forward to seeing their contributions to our efforts in building a welcoming community, interdisciplinary research, and computing for the common good.”
The addition of these five new faculty brings the college’s cohort of tenure-stream and teaching faculty to 74, including 40 who were hired in the last five years. In addition to these new hires, Ravi Karkar, who was hired in 2020 as an assistant professor, will arrive on campus in the fall of 2022.
Chuang Gan: Computer Vision x Robotics
Assistant Professor
Starting Fall 2023
Chuang Gan currently serves as a principal research staff member at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and as a research scientist at MIT. His research focuses on video understanding, including representation learning, neural-symbolic visual reasoning, audio-visual scene analysis, and embodied intelligence. He is the recipient of a Microsoft Fellowship and a Baidu Fellowship, and he holds a doctorate in electrical and electronics engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.
Stefan Krastanov: Quantum Information Systems
Assistant Professor
Starting Fall 2022
Stefan Krastanov’s research explores the characterization and control of quantum hardware, including quantum circuit design, error correction, optimal control, and parameter estimation that includes the use of machine learning techniques. He received a doctorate in physics from Yale University, where he was awarded the Prize Teaching Fellowship and the Yale Graduate School Disciplinary Outreach Service Award for his educational work. Stefan recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT.
Scott Niekum: Machine Learning x Robotics
Associate Professor
Starting Fall 2022
Scott Niekum joins the CICS faculty from the University of Texas at Austin, where he directed the Personal Autonomous Robotics Lab. Working at the intersection of machine learning and robotics, his current research focuses on developing algorithms to solve problems that robot learners encounter in real-world interactive settings. Niekum is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award, and the UT Austin CNS Teaching Excellence Award. He received a doctorate in computer science in 2013 from UMass Amherst.
Filip Rozpedek: Quantum Information Systems
Assistant Professor
Starting Fall 2023
Filip Rozpedek is currently completing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago, where he is performing theoretical research on designing error-correction-based quantum network architectures. He is actively involved with the NSF Center for Quantum Networks. He holds a doctorate from the Delft University of Technology in Delft, the Netherlands, where he worked on modeling proof-of-principle quantum network experiments and contributed to the European quantum network development efforts within the Quantum Internet Alliance, a consortium within the EU Quantum Flagship.
Hao Zhang: Robotics
Associate Professor
Starting Fall 2022
Hao Zhang comes to UMass Amherst from the Colorado School of Mines. As director of the Human-Centered Robotics Lab, he leads research on lifelong collaborative autonomy. His research broadly lies in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and extended reality for robotics. Dr. Zhang is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and a DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA) recognizing his contributions to human-inspired and human-integrated robot adaptation.