Four new professors join Computer Science Faculty

The Computer Science Department is pleased to announce our newest professors of computer science. Samir Khuller, Professor and Elizabeth Stevinson Iribe Chair of Computer Science mentioned the diverse interests and talent pool of the newest members of the faculty.  "Our new, brilliant faculty will add to the wonderful, diverse graduate and undergraduate courses we offer. Their research will greatly contribute to our well-established  innovative, brilliant, work that our amazing faculty members continually produce," he said.  These four assistant professors will join the thirteen professors added to the faculty during Khuller's tenure as chair.  This new group of professors have research expertise ranging from databases and human-computer interaction, to machine learning, from quantum computing to computer vision.

Leilani Battle

Battle joins the Computer Science Department as an assistant professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she has recently defended her Ph.D. in Computer Science.  Her work focuses on “interactive data-intensive systems that can aid analysts in performing complex data exploration and analysis.” Her research is “anchored in the field of databases, but utilizes research methodology and techniques from HCI and visualization to integrate data processing (databases) with interactive interfaces (HCI, visualization).”

Jordan Boyd-Graber

Boyd-Graber joins the Computer Science Department as an Associate Professor from the University of Colorado Boulder where he has been an Assistant Professor of Computer Science.  He will also hold a joint appointment as an Associate Professor in the iSchool here.  His research involves “making machine learning more useful, more interpretable, and able to learn and interact from humans. This helps users sift through decades of documents; discover when individuals lie, reframe, or change the topic in a conversation; or to compete against humans in games that are based in natural language.”  Boyd-Graber earned his doctorate in computer science from Princeton University in 2010.

Abhinav Shrivastava

Shrivastava joins the Computer Science Department as an Assistant Professor from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.  He is currently a fifth year PhD candidate who is “working on discovering the underlying regularities, or structure, in our visual world and leveraging it in large-scale recognition algorithms and systems. This work spans a wide range of recognition tasks, and includes frequent collaborations with researchers from both academia and industry.”  Shrivastava is a featured speaker at the workshop on deep learning on May 24th .

Xiaodi Wu

Wu joins the Computer Science Department from the University of Oregon’s Computer and Information Science Department where he has been an Assistant Professor.  Wu’s research interests involve theoretical computer science with special focus on classical and quantum complexity; classical and quantum cryptography; quantum communication; quantum algorithms; quantum entanglement; quantum simulation and complexity of quantum physical systems; quantum property testing , quantum programming languages, and purely classical topics including sum of squares proof and optimizations and learning theory.  He is also “interested in collaborating with experimentalists to demonstrate ideas from theoretical study."  Wu earned his doctorate in theoretical computer science from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2013.

We look forward to celebrating our new professors upon their arrival, and are confident that they will have successful careers here at the University of Maryland.