CICS Announces the Hiring of Twelve New Faculty in 2020
The College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) announces the appointment of twelve new tenure-track and teaching faculty in 2020 to create capacity for its growing academic and research programs, after hiring five new faculty in 2019.
“After extraordinary work by the search chairs, hiring committees, hiring teams, and grad reps, I look forward to welcoming twelve impressive new faculty over the next few years,” said Laura Haas, dean of CICS. “The college will be considerably stronger for their contributions, as we work together to increase teaching capacity and build on our research strengths in several key areas, including data science and artificial intelligence, theory, information retrieval, and robotics.”
These twelve new faculty will bring the college’s cohort of tenure-stream and teaching faculty to 74. Of the college’s 62 current and 11 emeritus members, 40 are professional society fellows and 20 have received lifetime research achievement awards. In addition to these new hires, Yair Zick, who was hired in 2019 as an assistant professor, will arrive on campus in the fall of 2020.
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Hung Le was most recently a postdoc at the University of Victoria, on a fellowship from the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences. He received his doctorate in computer science from Oregon State University, and his bachelor’s degree from Hanoi University of Science and Technology. His research has focused on problems in low dimensional metrics, minor-free graphs, and graphs of bounded expansion. |
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Hui Guan recently received her doctorate from North Carolina State University. Her research lies in the intersection of machine learning and programming systems, with a focus on improving machine learning through innovations in algorithms and programming systems, as well as leveraging machine learning to improve high-performance computing. She holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications in China. |
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Peter Klemperer was most recently an assistant professor of computer science at Mount Holyoke College. He is interested in all aspects of computer security, with an emphasis on virtualized systems and usability, including how virtualization can provide an isolated high ground position for malware detection in operating systems and processes. He received his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University in 2014, and a master’s degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2008. |
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Hamed Zamani’s research interests include various aspects of information retrieval, recommender systems, and machine learning. He was most recently a Researcher at Microsoft, working on a wide range of theoretical and practical problems related to search engines. Prior to Microsoft, he spent four years at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval at the College of Information and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst, where he received his doctorate in 2019, winning the college’s Outstanding Dissertation Award for that year. |
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Laure Thompson's research bridges machine learning and natural language processing with humanistic scholarship. She develops methods for understanding and intentionally altering what models learn, as well as methods and methodologies for studying humanities collections at scale. Her work focuses on understanding how information is encoded within trained models' learned representations and how intentional data modification affects these representations. Laure Thompson is completing her PhD at Cornell University and is expected to receive her doctorate later this summer. She received a best paper award from COLING in 2018. |
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Ghazaleh Parvini’s research focuses on algorithms, optimization, computational biology and graph theory. She is a doctoral candidate at Iowa State University, where she works as a graduate instructor teaching discrete mathematics. Parvini received her master’s and bachelor’s degrees from the University of Tehran in 2015 and 2012. She has previously worked as a software developer, instructor, and mathematics teacher, and describes herself as “a teacher, a programmer, and a theory lover.” |
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Ethan Zuckerman comes to UMass after nearly a decade at MIT, where he served as director of the Center for Civic Media and associate professor of practice in media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab. The author of the books Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, and the forthcoming Mistrust: How Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them, his research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the role of technology in international development and the use of new media technologies by activists. He received his bachelor's degree from Williams College and, as a Fulbright scholar, studied at the University of Ghana at Legon. His interdisciplinary position is jointly supported by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the College of Information and Computer Sciences. |
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Bruno Castro da Silva was most recently an associate professor at the Institute of Informatics at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul UFRGS, Brazil. His research interests lie in the intersection of machine learning, reinforcement learning, optimal control theory, and robotics, and include the construction of reusable motor skills, active learning, efficient exploration of large state-spaces, and Bayesian optimization applied to control. He was previously a postdoctoral associate at the Aerospace Controls Laboratory at MIT LIDS. He received his doctorate in computer science from the College of Information and Computer Sciences, UMass Amherst in 2014, and his master’s and bachelor’s degrees in computer science from UFRGS in 2007 and 2004. |
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Donghyun Kim aspires to create robust and versatile legged robots capable of all-terrain mobility for service and emergency applications, with a focus on optimizing control algorithms to accomplish advanced dynamic locomotion. He was most recently a postdoctoral associate at MIT. He received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017, and his master’s and bachelor’s degrees in mechanical engineering from Seoul National University and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 2012 and 2007. |
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Cindy Xiong is a doctoral candidate in the Visual Thinking Lab at Northwestern University. Her research interests include cognitive psychology, perception, education, decision making and data visualization. Xiong was a visiting scholar at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in 2018, and received bachelor’s degrees in applied mathematics and psychology from UCLA in 2016. |
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Gayane Vardoyan is a doctoral candidate working in systems and networking at CICS with advisor Don Towsley. Her recent research interests have focused on problems in quantum communication. Prior to joining CICS, she will be a postdoc at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, supported by the Quantum Software Consortium's Ada Lovelace Fellowship. Vardoyan received her master’s from CICS in 2017 and a bachelor’s in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. Previously, she worked at the Argonne National Lab and the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago. |
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Ravi Karkar is a doctoral candidate in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His research focus is on designing, developing, and evaluating tools that can enable people to gather data and interpret personal aspects of their medical condition in the context of their day-to-day lives. He received his master’s degree in computer science from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2012 and his bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Gujarat University, India in 2011. |
Hung Le, Assistant Professor
Hui Guan, Assistant Professor
Peter Klemperer, Senior Teaching Faculty
Hamed Zamani, Assistant Professor
Laure Thompson, Assistant Professor
Ghazaleh Parvini, Teaching Faculty
Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor
Bruno Castro da Silva, Assistant Professor 
Donghyun Kim, Assistant Professor
Cindy Xiong, Assistant Professor 
Gayane Vardoyan, Assistant Professor 
Ravi Karkar, Assistant Professor