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.

• B.Sc., Jordan University of Science and Technology, Jordan (2003)
• M.Sc., University of British Columbia (2008)
• Ph.D., University of British Columbia (2013)

• Leverage advances in networking, processing, and storage devices to improve systems performance and efficiency
• Optimize the modern data center stack using domain specific optimizations
• Build a software stack to facilitate building efficient cloud applications using new cloud paradigms (e.g., serverless, cloud-native, and disaggregated architectures)

Samer Al-Kiswany Publications

• B.Tech., Indian Institute of Technology, India (1988)
• M.Sc., Syracuse University, United States of America (1989)
• Ph.D., University of Waterloo, Canada (1998)

• 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

N. Asokan Publications

Degrees

• B.Sc., Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal (2014)
• M.Sc., Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal (2016)
• Ph.D., Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal (2021)

Research interests

• Network traffic analysis and obfuscation, with applications to Internet censorship circumvention and anonymous communication
• Security of programmable network infrastructures, with applications to network threat detection, mitigation, and recovery
• Digital forensics and information hiding

Publications

Diogo Barradas on Google Scholar

• B.C.Sc., University of Manitoba (2004)
• Ph.D., University of British Columbia (2010)

• Computer graphics and scientific computing
• Physics-based numerical simulation of fluid and solid phenomena, for applications in computer animation, visual effects, game development, and interactive virtual environments

Christopher Batty on Google Scholar

• B.Sc., Brown University, United States (1969)
• Ph.D., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States (1974)

• Requirements engineering (RE) in the specific, software engineering (SE) in general
• Within RE, issues, including human behavior, that affect the adoption of and the effectiveness of RE in the software development lifecycle
• In general, why RE and SE are not working the way they’re supposed to

Daniel Berry on DBLP

• B.Math., University of Waterloo
• M.Sc., McGill University
• Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, United States

• Randomized and sublinear-time algorithms
• Complexity theory

Eric Blais on DBLP

Degrees

• B.Sc., Badji Mokhtar Annaba University, Algeria (1988)
• M.Sc., Université de Pierre et Marie Curie (now Sorbonne Université), France (1990)
• Ph.D., Université de Pierre et Marie Curie (now Sorbonne Université), France (1994)

Research interests

• Management of resources, systems and services in wired and wireless networks
• Current applications include network virtualization, software-defined networking, network function virtualization, cloud and edge computing, 5G and beyond mobile communications networks, blockchains, and cybersecurity

Publications

Raouf Boutaba on Google Scholar

• B.Sc., York University (2010)
• M.Sc., University of Toronto (2012)
• Ph.D., University of Toronto (2017)

• Parallel, concurrent and distributed data structures, especially lock-free ones
• Algorithms for recent technologies like non-volatile memory, transactional memory, remote direct memory access (RDMA)
• High performance memory allocators and safe reclamation for concurrent software
• Designing novel CPU instructions for thread synchronization, memory management, cache communication, etc.

Trevor Brown on DBLP

• B.Sc., Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China (2014)
• M.Sc., RWTH Aachen University, Germany (2017)
• Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara, United States (2021)

• Natural Language Processing
• Deep Learning

Wenhu Chen on Google Scholar

• B.Sc., University of Western Ontario (1991)
• M.Sc., University of British Columbia (1993)
• Ph.D., University of British Columbia (1998)

• Software engineering
• Formal methods
• Software requirements and modelling

Nancy Day Publications

• B.Sc., Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece (2009)
• M.Sc., The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom (2010)
• Ph.D., The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom (2015)

• Machine Learning on Graphs
• Numerical Optimization

Kimon Fountoulakis on Google Scholar

• B.Math., University of Waterloo (1995)
• M.Sc., University of California, Berkeley, United States (1998)
• Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, United States (2000)

• Privacy enhancing technologies, including metadata-protecting communication, privacy preserving computation, and censorship resistance
• Computer security and privacy, including trusted execution environments and oblivious algorithms
• Cryptography, including security multiparty computation, threshold cryptography, and zero-knowledge proofs

Ian Goldberg Publications

• A.B., Brown University, United States (1980)
• M.A., Adelphi University, United States (1982)
• Ph.D., Adelphi University, United States (1984)
• J.D., Georgetown University Law Center (1999)

• High-Recall Information Retrieval, in which the goal is to find substantially all information relevant to an information need with the least possible effort, where the stakes of missing relevant information are high
• Key application areas include electronic discovery in law, curation of government archives, and systematic review in evidence-based medicine
• Responsible AI and Data Science, which includes, but is not limited to, legal, ethical, and policy considerations

Maura R. Grossman on Google Scholar

• B.Eng., University of Tokyo, Japan (2006)
• Ph.D., University of California San Diego, United States (2011)

• Combines applied mathematics, computer science, and physics to tackle problems related to visual simulation of objects
• Topics include computer graphics, light transport simulation, computational statistics, and numerical analysis (numerical solvers for differential/integral equations)

Toshiya Hachisuka Publications

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.

• Diploma, ETH Zürich, Switzerland (1997)
• M.Sc., Carnegie Mellon University (2003)
• Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University (2005)

• Information privacy and computer and networks security with a focus on security and privacy challenges that arise in the context of smartphones, mobile applications, and IoT
• User authentication with a focus on using machine learning for securing or attacking devices and services
• Implicit user authentication, where a device or service continuously authenticates the user based on their behaviour and context

Urs Hengartner Publications

• B.Sc., McGill University (1992)
• M.Sc., University of British Columbia (1995)
• Ph.D., University of British Columbia (2004)

• Assistive Technologies and Rehabilitation Science
• Emotional Artificial Intelligence and Affective Computing
• Decision-making under uncertainty

Jesse Hoey on Google Scholar

• B.Sc., Cornell University, United States (2012)
• S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States (2014)
• Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States (2018)

• Differential privacy, robustness
• Machine learning and statistics
• Algorithms

Gautam Kamath on Google Scholar

• B.Math., University of Waterloo (1996)
• M.Sc., University of Washington, United States (1998)
• Ph.D., University of Washington, United States (2002)

• Applications of mathematics and computation in art and design
• Computer graphics
• Computational geometry

Craig S. Kaplan Publications

• B.Sc., University of Alberta (1973)
• M.Sc., University of Alberta (1986)
• Ph.D., University of Alberta (1988)

• Symbolic Computation/Computer Algebra
• Scientific Computation/Computational Finance

George Labahn Publications

• B.Sc., The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China
• M.Sc., University of Toronto
• Ph.D., University of Toronto

• Algorithms
• Optimization
• Spectral Graph Theory

Lap Chi Lau Publications

• B.Math., University of Waterloo (2001)
• M.Sc., McGill University (2002)
• Ph.D., McGill University (2005)

• My research interests are in programming languages and compilers. My focus is on program analysis of object-oriented languages. I am currently directing most of my attention to Scala.

Ondřej Lhoták Publications

Degrees

• B.S., Computer and Software Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China (2010)
• M.S., Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China (2013)
• Ph.D., Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, University of Southern California, United States (2017)

Research interests

• Developing machine learning and statistical methods for genomics and proteomics data analysis using interpretable machine learning, reproducible (error-controlled) machine learning, and heterogeneous data integration
• Developing interpretation methods to find scientifically interesting and statistically confident hypotheses from complex biological data from single-cell genomics, mass spectrometry-based proteomics, and metagenomics

Publications

Yang Lu on Google Scholar

• B.Sc., University of Toronto (1979)
• M.Math., University of Waterloo (1982)
• Ph.D., University of Toronto (1986)

• Algorithms, specifically computation geometry, graph algorithms and graph drawing
• Current topics include reconfiguration, triangulations of planar point sets, shortest path algorithms, and folding and unfolding problems

Anna Lubiw on Google Scholar

• B.A., University of California, Berkeley, United States (1986)
• M.Sc., University of Washington, United States (1988)
• Ph.D., University of Washington, United States (1992)

• Curve and Surface Design for Geometric Modeling and Computer Graphics

• CNC Machining

• Geometric Algebra and its applications to Computer Graphics

Stephen Mann on Google Scholar

Shane McIntosh joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as 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, Professor McIntosh has published 16 journal papers and 32 conference papers, all in the top research venues and leading journals of the field. As of August 2021, his papers have been cited more than 3,800 times with an h-index from Google Scholar of 32. He has been invited to many international workshops, such as Shonan and Dagstuhl.

Professor 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 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.

• B.Sc., Anna University, India (2006)
• M.Sc., North Carolina State University, United States (2008)
• Ph.D., North Carolina State University, United States (2011)

• Empirical Software Engineering, Mining Software Repositories, Mining Mobile App stores
• Diversity in Software Engineering
• Software Security, Static Analysis

Mei Nagappan on Google Scholar

• B.Sc., Yale University, United States (1983)
• M.Sc., University of Toronto (1988)
• Ph.D., University of Toronto (1991)

• Reconfiguration, including both algorithmic and structural investigations of the relationships among solutions to a problem or other entities, as related by step-by-step modifications
• Parameterized complexity, primarily algorithms, and among algorithms, primarily those involving graphs; considered on its own or in conjunction with reconfiguration

Naomi Nishimura on DBLP

• B.Sc., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States (2011)
• B.Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States (2011)
• M.Sc., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States (2012)
• Ph.D., Princeton University, United States (2017)

• Complexity Theory
• Optimization
• Geometry

Rafael Oliveira on Google Scholar

• B.Math., University of Waterloo (1994)
• M.Sc., University of British Columbia (1996)
• Ph.D., Simon Fraser University (2003)

• Neural networks and artificial intelligence
• Neuroscience, and the use of neural networks to understand the computational principles of the brain
• Biologically-inspired neural learning algorithms

Jeff Orchard on Google Scholar

• B.Sc., Middle East Technical University, Turkey (1974)
• M.Sc., Middle East Technical University, Turkey (1978)
• M.Sc., Ohio State University, United States (1981)
• Ph.D., Ohio State University, United States (1983)

• My research is on data management. Although I have done work in basic database technologies such as query processing, transaction processing, and database integration, the main focus of my research follows two threads: (1) application of database technology to non-traditional data types, and (2) distributed & parallel data management.

Tamer Özsu on DBLP

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. 

Degrees

• B.Sc., Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Iran (2014)
• M.A and Ph.D., Computer Science, Princeton University, United States (2019)

Research interests

• Networked systems, with a focus on software defined networking (SDN) and programmable data planes
• Recent focus on how to exploit programmability to create networks that are verifiably robust across the stack, from the protocols themselves down to the switch and network interface card (NIC) hardware that processes packets

Publications

Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo on Google Scholar

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 has a PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He joined the Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in August 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 joined the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science as an Assistant Professor in October 2020. He completed his doctorate in Computer Science at Cornell University in August 2019.

Yizhou designs, implements, and studies programming languages. He aims for high-level language abstractions that can provide the expressiveness and assurance required to build extensible, reliable software.

Yizhou also 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.