Computer Science Welcomes New Faculty

Date

Author

By Casey Moffitt
20-21CS.faculty

The Department of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology is welcoming five new members to its faculty this academic year to meet the needs of the fast-growing department in the new College of Computing.

Three new assistant professors—Yue Duan, Stefan Muller, and Kai Shu—will start at Illinois Tech in the fall 2020 semester, to be joined in spring 2021 by assistant professor Yan Yan and senior lecturer Gaowen Liu.

“I am delighted to welcome these exceptional new faculty members to Illinois Tech, and to see them join in the intellectual life of the university,” says Shlomo Engelson Argamon, Department of Computer Science chair. “They will expand our range of research and teaching in key areas including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, programming languages, and social computing. I look forward to the new and fruitful collaborations that this growth will enable between computer science and the other disciplines, within the university and beyond.”

Duan joins Illinois Tech from Cornell University, where he was a postdoctoral associate. His research in computer security, mobile devices, and blockchain has the overall goal of making computer systems more secure by combining diverse methods in computer science including program analysis, deep learning, model checking, and natural language processing.

Muller comes to Illinois Tech from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. He describes his research goal as making software more reliable, more efficient, and easier to write. His work is mainly in programming language theory and code analysis, but spans a wide range of areas from software systems and parallel computing to computational theory and machine learning.

Shu joins Illinois Tech from the Data Mining and Machine Learning Lab at Arizona State University. His research is at the cutting edge of machine learning and data-mining work that addresses socially relevant applications including algorithmic fairness, combating disinformation and fake news, and social media analytics.

Next spring Yan will join the Illinois Tech faculty from Texas State University, where he was an assistant professor of computer science. He received the 2019 Texas State University Presidential Distinction Award for Excellence in Scholarly/Creative Activities, and his research in computer vision, machine learning, and multimedia seeks to solve questions of deep understanding of large-scale video data.

Liu brings research and teaching expertise in machine learning and computer vision, and has published research on generative adversarial networks, convolutional neural networks, image segmentation, and cross-view image/video generation.

NewComputerScienceFaculty-202108