UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State School of Electrical Engineering and ComputerScience (EECS) welcomed six new faculty members in August.
Dan Kahn joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering as a lecturer on Aug. 16. His education includes a bachelor of science in computer engineering and a master of science in computer science from the University of Illinois. He spent more than 25 years in industry working for Abbott Laboratories, Bell Labs, Motorola and HP in various capacities. Prior to joining Penn State, he taught at Illinois Institute of Technology, University of South Dakota and North Dakota State University.
Young Kun Ko joined the Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor on Aug. 15. He was a faculty fellow at New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences from 2018 to 2021. He received his doctorate from Princeton University in 2018 and his bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago in 2013. He mainly researches computational complexity theory and information theory.
Bin Li joined the Department of Electrical Engineering as an associate professor on Aug. 1. He received his doctoral degree in electrical and computer engineering from Ohio State in 2014. Prior to joining Penn State, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Coordinated Science Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from June 2014 to August 2016, and an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Rhode Island from August 2016 to July 2021. His research focuses on the intersection of networking, machine learning and system development, and their applications in networking for virtual/augmented reality, mobile edge computing, mobile crowd-learning and Internet-of-Things (IoT). He received both the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and Google Faculty Research Award in 2020.
Ruslan Nikolaev joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering as an assistant professor on Aug. 15. He previously served as a research assistant professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at Virginia Tech. He received his doctoral degree in computer science from Virginia Tech in 2013. After receiving his doctorate, he worked in the industry full-time from 2014 to 2017, first as a software engineer with Microsoft Corporation and then as a senior software engineer with Pure Storage Inc. His research interests are in computer systems, with a particular focus on operating systems; concurrency including lock-free and wait-free data structures and safe memory reclamation; and operating system security.
Xiaozhen "Jen" Wang joined the Department of Electrical Engineering as an assistant teaching professor on Aug. 15. She received her doctorate in physics from the University of Ottawa, Canada, in 2012. She was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign between 2014 and 2016, and a lecturer and an adjunct professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Rhode Island prior to joining Penn State. Her research interests are optical sensing and imaging techniques.
Huijuan Xu joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering as an assistant professor on Aug. 15. Her research focuses on deep learning, computer vision and natural language processing, particularly in understanding action in video. She builds on previous work in action detection and compositional action recognition, as well as the combination of natural language and visual recognition in the form of captioning, visual question answering and cross-modal retrieval. Xu is currently working on projects related to visual structural representation with commonsense knowledge reasoning and fine-grained action understanding with efficient data usage. She received her doctorate in computer science from Boston University in 2018 and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Berkeley afterward.
The School of EECS will also welcome Chris Dancy, associate professor of industrial and manufacturing engineering and of computer science and engineering, in January 2022; Debarati Das, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, in January 2022; Kiwan Maeng, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, in August 2022; and Abhinav Verma, assistant professor of computer science and engineering, in August 2022.