Grigorescu and Wu Join CS Faculty

This semester, Purdue University’s Department of Computer Science welcomes two new faculty members. Elena Grigorescu and Yi Wu both join the computer science faculty as Assistant Professors, effective Fall 2012.

Dr. Elena Grigorescu’s research interests lie in theoretical aspects of computer science, with a focus on sublinear-time algorithms, property testing, coding theory, and complexity theory. Her thesis investigated the role played by symmetries in testing algebraic properties.

Grigorescu received her M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2006 and 2010, respectively. Prior to that, she earned a B.A. from the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science at Bard College in 2004.

Most recently, Grigorescu has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where she co-instructed a course on discrete Fourier analysis. Her work was sponsored by a Computing Innovation Fellowship from the Computing Research Association, the Computing Community Consortium, and the National Science Foundation.

Grigorescu’s hobbies include hiking, running, biking, and photography. Of joining Purdue Computer Science, she says, "I am excited about starting new research projects and finding collaboration opportunities with my colleagues here. I am also thrilled about teaching my own course, which has the format of a hybrid between lecture-style presentations and a seminar with students presenting theory papers. We will also have speakers from other universities talking about their research."

More information about Dr. Grigorescu can be found at her website.

Dr. Yi Wu’s research interests include approximation algorithms, hardness of approximation, optimization, computational learning theory, probability, complexity theory, and randomized algorithms. "The Approximability of Learning and Constraint Satisfaction Problems" was the title of Wu's Ph.D. thesis, which won the Distinguished Dissertation Award from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science in 2010.

Wu received his M.S. (in language technology) and Ph.D. (in computer science) from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and 2010, respectively. His B.E. in computer science was earned at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China in 2005.

Since 2010, Wu has worked as a postdoctoral research scientist at the IBM Research – Almaden in San Jose, California and given talks on approximation algorithms at various workshops.

Wu is originally from Shanghai, China and, during his leisure time, he enjoys running. He is thrilled to be joining Purdue CS and looks forward to cheering on Boilermaker basketball this year.

More information about Dr. Wu can be found at his website.