Meet the New CS Faculty

07-30-2008

Fall 2008 brings four new faculty members to the Purdue University Department of Computer Science. Please join the department in welcoming core hires Charles Killian and Alex Pothen, and joint hires Saugata Basu (Mathematics Department) and S.V.N. Vishwanathan (Statistics Department).

Charles Killian joins Purdue as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science. Killian received his PhD in computer science from the University of California, San Diego, his MS in computer science from Duke University, and his BS in computer science and applied math from North Carolina State University. His research interests are distributed systems, model checking, programming languages, overlay networks, P2P networks, operating systems, network security, resource management, discrete math, Venn diagrams, and Gray codes. His recent work involves developing a compiler to eliminate tedious and repetitive programming, reduce bugs, and add structure to systems building enabling analyses. Killian has worked at Microsoft Research, AT&T Solutions, Infopike, North Carolina State University, Duke University, and MCNC.

Alex Pothen joins Purdue as a Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Computing Research Institute.  His academic career includes positions at the University of Waterloo, Penn State, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, ICASE (a high-performance computing research institute at NASA), and Old Dominion University. Pothen’s research interests are in computational science and engineering (CSE), high performance computing (HPC), and bioinformatics. Within CSE, his research involves designing algorithms and software for solving combinatorial problems from science and engineering. He received his PhD in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Cornell University, and a five-year integrated BS/MS degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India. Pothen is also the Director of the Combinatorial Scientific Computing and Petascale Computing (CSCAPES) Institute, a multi-institution research consortium funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science from 2006 to 2011.

Saugata Basu has a joint appointment as a Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science with Mathematics as his home department. He comes to Purdue from the Georgia Institute of Technology where he is currently on leave as a Professor in the School of Mathematics and College of Computing. His research interests are in real algebraic geometry, computational algebra and geometry, and theoretical computer science. Basu has previously held positions at the University of Michigan, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. He received his PhD from the Courant Institute, New York University and his BTech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Basu has also held visiting positions at Universite de Rennes, the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications in Minneapolis, and the Institute Henri Poincaré, Paris.

S.V.N. Vishwanathan is an Assistant Professor of Statistics and Computer Science with Statistics as his home department. His research focuses on machine learning with an emphasis on graphical models, structured prediction, kernel methods, and convex optimization. His work encompasses problems such as pattern recognition, OCR, bioinformatics, text analysis, and optimization. Vishwanathan earned his PhD and MS in computer science from the Indian Institute of Science in 2002 and 2000, respectively. He earned his BE in electronics engineering from the M. S. University of Baroda. Vishwanathan is a principal researcher in the Statistical Machine Learning program at NICTA with an adjunct appointment at the College of Engineering and Computer Science (CECS) at Australian National University.