Purdue Computer Science welcomes new faculty
09-16-2021
New faculty at the Department of Computer Science, top row from l to r: Steve Hanneke, Rajiv Khanna, Anuran Makur, Ahmed Qureshi, bottom row from l to r: Paul Valiant, Raymond Yeh, Ruqi Zhang & Tianyi Zhang.
The Department of Computer Science is happy to announce that eight new faculty members will join the department from the 2021 hiring effort. They join the department during a large-scale hiring effort across key strategic areas in the College of Science. Five faculty members have arrived for the fall 2021 semester. Three faculty members will join at a later date. Rajiv Khanna will join in the spring of 2022 as an assistant professor and Raymond Yeh and Ruqi Zhang will join in the fall of 2022 as assistant professors.
"On behalf of our faculty, I am pleased to welcome our new colleagues. We look forward their expertise and contributions to our current research and education programs,” said Sunil Prabhakar, Department Head and Professor of Computer Science.
Steve Hanneke joins the Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor. Previously he was a research assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute of Chicago. From 2012-2018 he was an independent scientist working at Princeton University. Additionally, he was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University from 2009 to 2012. In 2009, Hanneke completed his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Melon University. He covers topics in statistical learning theory, particularly statistical analysis of machine learning.
Anuran Makur earned his ScD from Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at MIT. His research interests include theory of machine learning, combinatorial statistics, and information theory and statistical inference. He joins the department as an assistant professor.
Ahmed Qureshi received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of California, San Diego in 2021. He joins the Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor and directs the Cognitive Robot Autonomy and Learning (CoRAL) Laboratory. His research is at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
Paul Valiant joins the Department of Computer Science as an associate professor. He was a Von Neumann Fellow at Princeton University from 2020-2021 and was previously an assistant professor at Brown University. He completed an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship at University of California, Berkley in 2012. Prior to that, he completed a postdoc at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from MIT in 2008. His research interests lie in algorithms and complexity, machine learning, fluid dynamics, and the brain.
Tianyi Zhang earned his PhD in Computer Science in 2019 from the University of California, Los Angeles. He joins the department as an assistant professor. His research interests include software engineering, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University in 2020.