The faculty of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) continues to grow!
“We are delighted to have four new faculty members joining us this fall, and a fifth arriving in fall 2022,” said Patrick J. Flynn, Fritz Duda Family Professor of Engineering and department chair.
Diego Gómez-Zará will join the department as Assistant Professor in August 2022. His research interests include human collaboration across online platforms and systems, as well as the use of network science to leverage user decisions.
Gómez-Zará received his Ph.D. in technology and social behavior from Northwestern University in 2021. He is currently serving as a postdoctoral scholar in Northwestern’s Kellogg Center for Science of Science and Innovation.
Toby Jia-Jun Li has been appointed Assistant Professor. He studies human-computer interaction, end-user software engineering, machine learning, and natural language processing. Li’s work addresses the design, construction, and evaluation of systems for human-artificial intelligence (AI) collaborations.
Li received his Ph.D. in human-computer interaction from Carnegie Mellon University in 2021.
Joanna Cecilia da Silva Santos has been appointed Assistant Professor. She devises novel automated techniques to develop secure software systems. Her work focuses on the detection and mitigation of software vulnerabilities and architectural weaknesses, software architecture modeling, architectural compliance, and verification.
Santos received her Ph.D. in computing and information sciences from Rochester Institute of Technology in 2021.
Yanfang (Fanny) Ye has been appointed Collegiate Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. Her research encompasses data mining, machine learning, cybersecurity, and health informatics.
Her techniques advance the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI), significantly reducing the time needed to detect new malicious software — from weeks to seconds. These techniques have been incorporated into popular commercial security products that protect millions of users worldwide.
She has expanded her research to health intelligence focusing on combating the opioid epidemic and COVID-19 crisis. Specifically, the data and AI-driven system developed by Ye and her team early in pandemic has been deployed to provide near real-time risk assessment for individuals and organizations coping with COVID-19.
She comes to Notre Dame from Case Western Reserve University, where she was the Theodore L. and Dana J. Schroeder Associate Professor of Computer and Data Sciences.
Xiangliang (Lynn) Zhang has been appointed as Associate Professor. Her research interests include machine learning and data mining with an emphasis on recommender systems, network science, and mitigation of attacks on recommender systems.
Zhang comes to Notre Dame from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, where she has served as a faculty member since 2011. Zhang received her Ph.D. in 2010 from Université Paris-Sud 11 and Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA) in France.
“These dedicated teachers and gifted scholars will grow and strengthen our research and instructional programs in data science, machine learning/AI, human-computer interaction, and software engineering,” said Flynn.
“We’re excited to partner with them as they launch research programs, engage at all levels, and contribute to our rapidly broadening network of collaborations across campus and with scholars around the world.”
— Notre Dame College of Engineering