New Appointments in UMIACS

The University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) recently announced five new appointments, helping bring fresh expertise in data science, human-centered computing, wireless networking, and more, to the UMD campus.

Soheil Feizi, Ge Gao, Vanessa Frias-Martinez, Huaishu Peng and Nirupam Roy have each accepted an appointment to UMIACS.

Gao, Peng and Roy will join the institute in early 2019. Feizi and Frias-Martinez are already on campus, and will soon be joined by Leilani Battle and Abhinav Shrivastava, who received appointments in 2017 and are arriving to UMD in August.

UMIACS currently has more than 85 faculty and research scientists, with many of them working in the institute’s 16 centers and labs that focus on high-impact areas such as bioinformatics, computer vision, cybersecurity, natural language processing, quantum information science and more.

“We look forward to the innovative concepts and research programs that these new faculty will bring to the university,” says Mihai Pop, professor of computer science and interim director of UMIACS. “We plan to strongly support them with our cutting-edge computing capabilities and excellent administrative assistance that is provided to the entire UMIACS research community.”

Feizi is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research focuses on understanding various theoretical and practical aspects of machine learning and statistical inference problems.

He received his doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT in 2016.

Gao will join the College of Information Studies (Maryland's iSchool) as an assistant professor in early 2019. Her research interests lie in the field of human-computer interaction with specific focuses on computer-supported cooperative work, computer-mediated communication and human-centered computing.

She received her doctorate in communication with a minor in information science from Cornell University in 2017.

Frias-Martinez is an assistant professor in the iSchool and an affiliate assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. She also leads the Urban Computing Lab at UMD. Her research focuses on the use of large-scale ubiquitous data to model the interplay between human mobility patterns, social networks and the physical environment.

She received her doctorate in computer science from Columbia University in 2008.

Peng will join the Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor in early 2019. His research interests lie in the technical aspects of human-computer interaction with a focus on personal fabrication.

He will receive his doctorate in information science from Cornell University in 2018.

Roy will join the Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor in Spring 2019. His research focuses on sensing, mobile computing, cyber-physical systems, wireless networking with applications in localization, the Internet of Things, health care, security and wearables.

He will receive his doctorate in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018.

Battle is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. Her research interests focus on developing interactive data-intensive systems that can aid analysts in performing complex data exploration and analysis.

She received her doctorate in computer science from MIT in 2017.

Shrivastava is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science. His research focuses on artificial intelligence—particularly as it relates to computer vision, machine learning and robotics.

He received his doctorate in robotics from the Robotics Institute (School of Computer Science) at Carnegie Mellon University in 2017.