The ICS Department is excited to announce the arrival of four amazing new faculty members in Fall, 2024.
Huaijin (George) Chen joins the ICS department from Vayu Robotics where he was the computational imaging lead focusing on enhancing autonomous vehicle perception through innovative imaging techniques. From 2019 to 2022, he was with SenseBrain Technology, where he contributed to computational photography on smartphones. His team made strides in areas like novel image sensor, under-display camera tech, 3D ToF imaging, and neural image compression.
Huaijin obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University in 2019, where he explored physics-aware deep learning in computational imaging. He obtained his B.S. from RIT in Imaging Science in 2013.
Andrey Popov is coming to ICS from the Oden Institute for Computational Sciences and Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Andrey’s interests include data-driven science, knowledge-guided machine learning, and time integration.
Andrey obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech, and his B.S. in Mathematics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. During the course of his Ph.D., Andrey worked on ensemble filtering techniques including work with multifidelity data assimilation and with covariance shrinkage. He has also worked on extending and applying non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques to constructing efficient reduced order models for use in scientific applications.
Yifan Wang is particularly interested in databases, especially high-dimensional data systems like KNN search and vector database, AI+DB, Data Analytic Systems, as well as Information Retrieval. He currently pursues research topics about “AI + Data Systems”, such as specialized database architecture design for AI development and deployment, and AI-accelerated high-dimensional data management, as well as the corresponding applications like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for LLM.
Yifan obtained his Ph.D. and Masters degrees in Computer Science at the University of Florida in 2024 and 2019, and Bachelors degree in Electronics and Information Engineering at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2017.
Haopeng Zhang‘s research interests include natural language processing, generative AI, specifically on text summarization, multi-modal LLM, and LLM applications. He will be establishing the Aloha Lab, to conduct transformative research in various areas of NLP and AI.
Haopeng earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Davis under the supervision of Dr. Jiawei Zhang. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and two M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering / Computational Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology.