CCI's Department of Computer Science is thrilled to welcome four new faculty members, all starting in Fall 2021.
Preetha Chatterjee joins the department as a newly appointed Assistant Professor. Dr. Chatterjee completed her MS in Computer Science from the University of Delaware in 2016, and her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Delaware in 2021, advised by Dr. Lori Pollock. Her research interests are primarily in software engineering, with an emphasis on improving software engineers’ tools and environments through data mining, text analysis, and machine learning. She is especially interested in mining software repositories at a large scale, extending data analytics solutions to transform the plethora of information available in software artifacts into actionable nuggets of knowledge and tools, useful for both software engineers and researchers. Through her research, she intends to enable advances in areas including building/enhancing recommender systems for developers, information retrieval tasks from unstructured developer communications, and virtual assistants for software engineers.
Shahin Jabbari also joins the department as a new Assistant Professor. Dr. Jabbari was a doctoral student in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania until 2019, where he was advised by Dr. Michael Kearns. For the past two years, he was a CRCS postdoctoral fellow in the Computer Science Department of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Dr. Jabbari was hosted at Harvard by Milind Tambe and was also affiliated with the EconCS group. His main interests are in machine learning, game theory, and their intersection. Most recently, he has focused on the ethical aspects of algorithmic decision making and has been thinking about how AI-driven technology can lead to positive societal impact.
Kaidi Xu arrives to Drexel Computer Science from the Boston area as a new Assistant Professor. Dr. Xu obtained his PhD degree at Northeastern University in 2021, advised by Prof. Xue (Shelley) Lin. Before his time at Northeastern, he obtained his MS and BS degrees from the Department of Computer Science at University of Florida in 2017 and Sichuan University in 2015, respectively. Dr. Xu's primary research interests include machine learning and model compression and acceleration. Most recently, his research has focused on the robustness of machine learning, including adversarial examples, rigorous robustness verification, and certified defenses. Dr. Xu has published in various top international conferences including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, IJCAI, AAAI, CVPR, ECCV, and ICCV. Kaidi with his team is also the winner of the 2nd International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP’21) with the top-1 total score.
Yusuf Osmanlioglu joins the department as an Assistant Teaching Professor. Dr. Osmanlioglu completed his PhD in Computer Science in 2016 at Drexel University, with a dissertation on approximate solutions of hard combinatorial optimization problems involving graphs and their applications in various real-life setups including computer vision, wireless networks, and biomedical sciences. He also taught various CS courses including algorithms, data structures, computer graphics, and operating systems, during his graduate studies at Drexel both as an instructor and a teaching assistant. In his postdoctoral research at the Department of Radiology of University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Osmanlioglu investigated the structural and functional connectivity in the brain, an emerging field of research known as connectomics, using advanced graph theory methods. He has published in top-tier pattern recognition venues as well as neuroscience journals and conferences. His research interests include network neuroscientific analysis of healthy and patient brains as well as developing algorithms for improving neuro-oncological surgery.