The Department of Computer Science is excited to announce that the following three faculty members will be joining its ranks:
Dr. Mridul Aanjaneya joined the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University as an Assistant Professor starting Sep. 1, 2017. His research lies at the intersection of Computer Graphics, High-performance Computing, Computational Physics, and Applied Mathematics. Some of his recent work has focused on pushing the limits of computational fluid dynamics by designing novel data structures and algorithms that can accommodate over a billion degrees of freedom on heterogeneous (multi CPU-GPU) workstations. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2013, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin - Madison from 2014 - 2017. While at Stanford, he was also a consultant in the Spatial Technologies team at the Nokia Research Center for two years.
Dr. Yongfeng Zhang's research focuses on the intersection of Economic Data Science, Recommender Systems, and Information Retrieval. His recent research includes 1) Economic Data Science, including the application and analysis of economic theories in web applications such as recommendation, search, and sharing economy; 2) Explainable machine learning and its application to recommendation and search systems; 3) Conversational search, recommendation, and question answering systems. Dr. Zhang received his PhD (2016) and BE (2011) degrees in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, and the BS (2016) degree in Economics from Peking University. During 2015-2016 he was an Assistant Specialist in the School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, and in 2016-2017 he was a Postdoc Research Associate in CICS at UMass Amherst. Dr. Zhang is a Siebel Scholar and Baidu Scholar, as well as Microsoft and IBM PhD Fellowship winner. Dr. Zhang will be formally joining the department as Assistant Professor in January of 2018.
Dr. Sungjin Ahn is currently a Research Scientist at Element AI. Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montreal working with Prof. Yoshua Bengio on deep learning and its applications. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine, under the supervision of Prof. Max Welling. During his Ph.D. program, his research interest was on scalable approximate Bayesian inference. He co-developed the Stochastic Gradient MCMC algorithms and awarded best paper awards from the International Conference on Machine Learning in 2012 and the ParLearning in 2016, respectively. His current research interests include deep learning, deep reinforcement learning, robot learning, brain-inspired learning algorithms, and applying these methodologies to cognitive agent learning in complex environments. Dr. Ahn will be formally joining the department as Assistant Professor in September of 2018.
