Our People - Professors

Yousra Aafer joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science on January 1, 2020 as an Assistant Professor.

Yousra was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University under the supervision of Professor Xiangyu Zhang before her appointment at the Cheriton School of Computer Science. Her research interests span the areas of systems security and software engineering, specifically focusing on mobile and smart device security. 

She received her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and was advised by Professor Wenliang Du. Her previous research mainly tackled Android security.

N. Asokan joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in September 2019 as a Professor and a David R. Cheriton Chair in Software Systems.

He was a Professor of Computer Science at Aalto University since 2013. He was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Helsinki from 2012 to 2017. Between 1995 and 2012, he worked in industrial research laboratories designing and building secure systems, first at the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory as a Research Staff Member and then at Nokia Research Center, most recently as Distinguished Researcher.

Asokan’s primary research theme is systems security broadly, including topics like the development and use of novel platform security features, applying cryptographic techniques to design secure protocols for distributed systems, applying machine learning techniques to security/privacy problems, and understanding/addressing the security and privacy of machine learning applications themselves.

Asokan received his doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, MS in Computer and Information Science from Syracuse University, and BTech (Hons.) in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology at Kharagpur. He is an ACM Fellow and an IEEE Fellow. He was the founding director of the Helsinki-Aalto Center for Information Security.

For more information about Asokan's work see his website or follow him on twitter @nasokan.

Please also see Professor N. Asokan joins Cheriton School of Computer Science as Cheriton Chair in Software Systems.

Shalev Ben-David joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor on July 1, 2018 after a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Maryland.

His research interests are in classical and quantum complexity theory. 

Trevor Brown joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in the fall of 2018 as an Assistant Professor. He works in the area of multicore computing (both systems and theory). His current research focuses on non-uniform memory architectures, memory management, lock-free synchronization, distributed data structures, non-volatile memory and transactional memory.

Kimon Fountoulakis is an Assistant Professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science and a member of its Scientific Computation Group.

Previously, Kimon was a postdoctoral fellow and Principal Investigator at University of California Berkeley in the Department of Statistics and ICSI. He worked with Michael Mahoney. Before that he completed a PhD in optimization at University of Edinburgh under the supervision of Professor Jacek Gondzio. 

Kimon's most recent work focuses on large-scale optimization and its application to local graph clustering. He has also worked on parallelizing optimization and local graph analytics algorithms.

Kimon's past work includes higher-order optimization methods for machine learning and signal processing problems.

Toshiya Hachisuka will be joining the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Associate Professor in September 2020. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo, where he is leading his own research group on computer graphics. Before coming to the University of Tokyo, he was an Assistant Professor at Aarhus University from 2011 to 2014. 

He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at San Diego in 2011 and a B.Eng. from the University of Tokyo in 2006. His research interests include light transport simulation, computational statistics, numerical analysis, and physically based animation. He has a number of publications spanning across these topics in the area of computer graphics.

Xi He joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in spring 2019.

Xi graduated from National University of Singapore with double degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science. 

She completed her PhD at Duke University, working with Prof. Ashwin Machanavajjhala. Her research interests span the areas of privacy and security for big-data management and analysis.

Gautam Kamath joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in July 2019.  

Gautam was a PhD student at MIT, affiliated with the Theory of Computing group at CSAIL. He is interested in principled tools for statistical data science, with a focus on settings that are common in settings of modern data analysis (high-dimensions, robustness, and privacy). 

He was a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellow at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing for the fall 2018 semester program on Foundations of Data Science and the spring 2019 semester program on Data Privacy: Foundations and Applications. 

Dr. Shane McIntosh will be joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science an Associate Professor in July 2020. 

His research area is in empirical software engineering. More specifically, he has focused his research on release engineering. He has made significant research contributions in intelligent release pipelines, code review analysis, and mining software repositories. As of October 2019, Dr. McIntosh has published 16 journal papers and 32 conference papers, all in the top research venues and leading journals of the field. His papers have been cited almost 2400 times with an h-index from Google Scholar of 28. He has been invited to many international workshops, such as Shonan and Dagstuhl.

Dr. McIntosh has also contributed to the software engineering community as a program committee member in several top conferences, such as ICSE, FSE, and OOPSLA. He has been the co-chair of multiple workshops on release engineering and the co-chair of several tracks in top tier conferences. He was just awarded a Canada Research Chair (Tier II) at McGill, and he was a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship holder. He was one of two Ph.D. graduates from the Queen’s University class of 2015 to be recognized with the Academic Gold Medal from Governor General of Canada for his Ph.D. work.

Rafael Oliveira joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in January 2020. Before his faculty appointment in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science at University of Toronto and a research fellow at the Simons Institute. He completed a PhD at Princeton University under the supervision of Professor Zeev Dvir.

Rafael is broadly interested in the interplay between mathematics and computer science. In particular, he is interested in the interplay between algebra, analysis, combinatorics and complexity theory.

In addition to a PhD from Princeton, Rafael has a Master of Science degree in Computer Science, and a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Chengnian Sun joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in August 2019.

Chengnian’s research interests are in software engineering and programming languages, focusing on techniques, tools and methodologies for improving software quality and developers’ productivity. He has a PhD in Computer Science from National University of Singapore.

Before joining the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, Chengnian was a software engineer at Google Inc. in Mountain View, California, working on Java/Android compiler toolchains and machine learning platform for Google Search. Prior to Google, he spent three wonderful years working on techniques to detect 1600+ bugs in GCC and LLVM with his colleagues at UC Davis. 

Olga Veksler's research interests are in developing robust and efficient algorithms that automatically interpret visual information. In particular, she is interested in visual correspondence (stereo, motion) and image segmentation. Optimization techniques are of fundamental importance to computer vision problems. In her research, she finds graph algorithms and dynamic programming particularly useful for efficiently solving optimization problems arising in vision.

Meng Xu is currently a PhD candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He will be joining the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in July 2021.

Meng’s research is in the area of software security.

Implementation faults can be exploited by attackers to install malware and control systems over the Internet. Unfortunately, they are prevalent in all widely deployed software systems. These systems try to defend themselves by creating layers of abstraction, and often the last layer of defence is the operating system. Hence, it is important that operating systems have minimal implementation faults. They are also widely deployed, but their code base is large, consisting of several million lines.

Meng Xu’s research has focused on the Linux operating system, which is widely deployed on the Internet and is the basis for the commercial Android system used in many smartphones. Using software analysis techniques, Meng’s research automates the search for implementation faults in Linux. These techniques are challenging, since too many false positives will overwhelm any developer, yet any false negative may be enough for an attack. Using Meng’s research more than 100 implementation faults in Linux have been found and later fixed. These results underpin the applicability of his research to real-world security problems.

Yizhou Zhang will be joining the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science in August 2020 as an Assistant Professor. He is currently a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Cornell University.

Yizhou’s research interests are in the area of programming languages and software engineering, with an emphasis on programming-language design, semantics, and implementation, and with the overarching goal of improving programmer productivity and software reliability.

Yizhou has an M.S. in Computer Science from Cornell and a B.S. in Software Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.

Jian Zhao joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science in fall 2019 as an assistant professor. Previously, he was a senior research scientist in the Enterprise AI group at FX Palo Alto Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. 

His research lies at the intersection of information visualization, human-computer interaction and data science. He develops advanced visualizations that promote the interplay between human and machine. He focuses primarily on designing interactive visualization techniques to support complex analytical workflows: from exploratory data analysis, to model curation and explanation, and to insight communication and storytelling.

Jian received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He is the recipient of several scholarships, including an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Mitacs Awards. He has received multiple paper awards at top-tier venues and holds more than a dozen patents.