Daniel Kifer is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering department at Pennsylvania State University, with affiliations to the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences. His work bridges computer science, privacy-preserving machine learning, and geoscience applications. With over 10,000 citations and a high h-index, he focuses on methods to unify theoretical and applied research. Research Interests: Differential Privacy, Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning, Physics-Informed Neural Networks, Landslide Prediction, and Formal Verification of Privacy Systems. Recent projects include grants from the National Science Foundation: SaTC: CORE: Small (2024): privacy-preserving user data embedding in machine learning pipelines. SaTC: CORE: Medium (2017-2023): formal methods for differential privacy and accuracy optimization. His research outputs span domains like geoscience, database systems, and policy analysis, emphasizing precision and scalability of privacy-preserving algorithms.
Shungeng Zhang serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer & Cyber Sciences at Augusta University's School of Computer and Cyber Sciences. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Louisiana State University (2021) and a B.E. in Computer Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (2014). His educational background includes: Ph.D. in Computer Science, Louisiana State University, 2021 B.E. in Computer Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 2014 Dr. Zhang's research spans distributed systems, cloud computing, and cybersecurity with a focus on enhancing performance and scalability of web applications and IoT stream processing in cloud environments. He employs sophisticated timeline analysis and fine-grained monitoring to identify transient bottlenecks causing long-tail latency problems, addressing propagation effects in complex dependency chains among application components. His publication record (2017-2022) reveals consistent contributions to cloud systems performance, particularly in n-tier architectures, concurrency control, and latency optimization. Key themes include stream processing synchronization, fanout query performance, adaptive concurrency for SLO compliance, and mitigation of transient resource contention attacks across distributed systems. No scientific awards were mentioned in the provided information. Dr. Zhang actively seeks graduate students with strong computer systems backgrounds for research collaboration. His departmental service includes Faculty Assembly participation (2021-2022) and faculty interviewing duties. Professionally, he serves as a reviewer for ACM SoCC'23, ACM TOIT, SmartCom 2023, The Journal of Supercomputing, and ACM SoCC'22. Teaching responsibilities include AIST 4720 (Enterprise System Architectures), CSCI 1200 (Introduction to Computers and Programming), and graduate courses such as CSCI 8940 (Dissertation Research) and AIST 3310 (Advanced Networking). No dedicated research labs or teams were specified in the available documentation.
Emmett Witchel is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin , with research spanning computer architecture, systems, networking, security, and privacy . His work focuses on low-level systems optimization and secure concurrent execution. Research Interests: Concurrent systems, secure execution environments, GPU integration, distributed systems. Teaching: CS 380L (Advanced Operating Systems), CS 371M (Mobile Computing). Scientific Awards: Runner-up Best Paper, ASPLOS 2013 Runner-up Award for Outstanding Research, USENIX Symposium 2012 IEEE Micro Top Pick Award 2007 ACM Honorable Mention 2004 George M. Sprowls Award, MIT EECS 2004 Recent Publications demonstrate leadership in CXL pod databases ( Tigon ), stateful serverless computing ( Boki ), SmartNIC-accelerated file systems ( LineFS ), and GPU security ( Telekine ). His work bridges hardware-software co-design and practical systems implementation.
Alan Zaoxing Liu is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park , with appointments at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and Maryland Cybersecurity Center (MC2) . His research bridges systems, networking, and cybersecurity to design scalable, trustworthy approximate computing systems. Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University (2018) Postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon CyLab (2018–2020) Research Interests : Networked and data-intensive systems Telemetry/analytics for heterogeneous networks Machine learning for network optimization Security in programmable networks Recent Publications include work on future-proof telemetry (PromSketch, VLDB’25), scalable caching (OctoCache, ASPLOS’25), and secure network analytics (TrustSketch, NDSS’24). His NSF-funded projects focus on optics-enabled DDoS defense and data-driven network management. Scientific Awards : USENIX FAST Best Paper (2019) USENIX ATC 'Best of Rest' (2021) Red Hat Collaboratory Research Awards (2022, 2023) Teaching : Leads Cloud Computing at Boston University , emphasizing agile development, open-source collaboration, and cloud infrastructure.
Andrew McCallum is a Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Data Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Rochester (1995) and a BS from Dartmouth College (1989). His research focuses on machine learning, natural language processing, and information extraction, with applications to scientific literature and knowledge base construction. He has pioneered work on conditional random fields and probabilistic databases, and led the development of systems like Rexa, an advanced research paper search engine. Affiliations: Center for Data Science, Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, Computational Social Science Institute Key Projects: OpenReview.net, Unified Information Extraction, Automated Knowledge Base Construction His work emphasizes extracting actionable knowledge from unstructured text, with contributions to social network analysis, entity resolution, and semi-supervised learning. McCallum has over 300 publications and has received awards including the NSF ITR Grant, IBM Faculty Partnership Awards, and ACM/AAAI Fellowships. He has advised numerous students and served as ICML General Chair (2012). Recent Research Trends: Probabilistic box embeddings, case-based reasoning for knowledge bases, scalable clustering algorithms, and applications in biomedical informatics.
Tianzheng Wang is an Associate Professor and Director of the Dual-Degree and Partnerships Programs at the School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University. His research focuses on database systems, transaction processing, parallel and distributed computing, and embedded systems. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto (2017) and a BSc in Computing from Hong Kong Polytechnic University (2012). Research Interests: Database systems optimized for modern hardware, parallel programming, synchronization, and distributed architectures. His work emphasizes high-performance transaction processing and efficient indexing techniques, with applications in cloud and embedded systems. Awards: ACM SIGMOD Best Paper Award (2025), IEEE TCSC Early Career Award (2019), and multiple distinguished reviewing recognitions (SIGMOD/VLDB 2021-2024). His research has been integrated into systems like Amazon Redshift and DragonflyDB. Teaching: Leads courses such as CMPT 454 (Database Systems II), CMPT 300 (Operating Systems), and special topics in databases. Actively mentors graduate and undergraduate students in research projects. Labs & Collaborations: Heads the Data-Intensive Systems Lab, part of SFU's Data Science and Systems groups. Collaborates on tools like PiBench for persistent memory benchmarking and contributes to open-source projects like CoroBase and Tabular.
Heiner Litz is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science & Engineering Department at UC Santa Cruz's Baskin School of Engineering. He holds the Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair of Storage Systems Research and serves as Director of the Center for Research in Storage Systems (CRSS). He is also a member of UCSC's Hardware Systems Collective (HSC). Litz earned his PhD from Mannheim University and previously held positions at MIT, Google, and Stanford University. His research focuses on computer architecture and systems optimization , specifically improving hardware-software interfaces for data center workloads. Key areas include microarchitectural mechanisms (branch prediction, prefetching, cache design), profile-guided optimizations, and storage/disaggregated memory systems. His work bridges compiler techniques and hardware efficiency for emerging cloud applications. Recent publications emphasize profile-guided optimization across microarchitecture layers, storage scalability, and resource allocation in distributed systems. Trends include hardware-software co-design for data centers, RDMA-based protocols, and real-time control systems. Awards & Honors: Kumar Malavalli Endowed Chair of Storage Systems Research Best Paper Award at MICRO (2022) IEEE Micro Top Picks (2019, 2023) Best Paper Awards at ICPP (2008) and ARC (2009) Advising & Grants: He currently advises 11 PhD students and has graduated 8 MS/PhD students. Research is supported by NSF, Intel, Samsung, Google, Meta, Nutanix, HPE, ARM, Marvell, Cerabyte, Western Digital, and Broadcom. Labs & Teams: Directs CRSS, focusing on storage systems innovation, and collaborates with HSC on hardware-software integration projects.
Pratyush Mishra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science, where he is a member of the Security and Privacy Laboratory. His academic career bridges theoretical cryptography with practical implementations in secure computation systems. University of Pennsylvania (Current) UC Berkeley (Alma Mater) Dr. Mishra's research focuses on cryptography and computer security, particularly zkSNARKs, secure computation, and cryptographic proof systems. His work enables efficient privacy-preserving systems through innovations in zero-knowledge proofs and verifiable computation. He is a co-author and co-maintainer of the arkworks ecosystem, which provides foundational libraries for zkSNARK implementations used across industry and academia. His recent publications demonstrate significant contributions to proof accumulation, delegation-friendly zkSNARKs, and scalable zero-knowledge systems. These works appear consistently in top-tier security and cryptography venues including CRYPTO, IEEE S&P, and USENIX Security. ACM SIGSAC Doctoral Dissertation Award Runner-Up (2022) Dr. Mishra serves on prestigious program committees including IEEE S&P (2023-2026), CRYPTO (2023, 2025), and FC (2025). He currently advises five PhD students and teaches advanced cryptography courses covering both theoretical foundations and practical implementations of cryptographic systems. His research has practical impact through his role as founding scientist at Aleo, a startup based on his Zexe research project.
Torsten Grust is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Tübingen, leading the Database Systems research group since 2008. Previously, he held professorships at TU München and TU Clausthal. He earned his M.Sc. (Diploma) and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Universität Konstanz in 1994 and 1999, respectively. His research focuses on database languages, query and programming language technology, and scalable processing of non-relational queries. He bridges database and programming language research, emphasizing mutual benefits between the fields. **Education:** Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Konstanz (1999) M.Sc. (Diploma), Computer Science, University of Konstanz (1994) Visiting Scientist, IBM Silicon Valley Laboratories (2000) **Research Interests:** Design and optimization of database languages Query compilation and execution engines Integration of functional programming with SQL Query provenance and debugging **Awards and Honors:** ACM SIGMOD Reproducibility Award (2021) University of Tübingen Teaching Award (2021/22) Winner of Dyalog 2019 APL Program Solving Competition Member of the VLDB Endowment Board of Trustees (2022–2027) **Advising & Grants:** Guided numerous students, including alumni such as Alexander Ulrich, Benjamin Dietrich, and Christian Duta Recipient of grants supporting research in query compilation, provenance analysis, and database language design **Labs & Teams:** Leads the Database Systems research group at University of Tübingen Collaborates with the National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo) on query and programming languages
Shashi Shekhar is a Professor at the University of Minnesota, holding the distinguished titles of McKnight Distinguished University Professor and Distinguished University Teaching Professor. He serves as the ADC/CSE Chair and Director of the AI-LEAF Institute within the Department of Computer Science at the College of Science and Engineering. His research interests span multiple areas of spatial computing including spatial data science, spatial data mining, spatial databases, Geo-AI, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). His work has focused on developing scalable algorithms for eco-routing, evacuation route planning, and spatial pattern mining. He has made significant contributions to the field through his Spatial Databases textbook, the Encyclopedia of GIS which has seen over 192,918 downloads in 2017, and a spatial computing book for professionals. His research group has produced numerous PhD graduates dating back to 1993 through 2023. Analysis of his recent publications reveals a strong focus on applying spatial computing to critical societal challenges including climate change mitigation through the AI-LEAF Institute, pandemic response through mobility data analysis, and sustainable transportation through eco-routing algorithms. His work bridges theoretical advances in spatial data science with practical applications in urban planning, emergency management, and environmental sustainability. Distinguished McKnight University Professor Distinguished University Teaching Professor UCGIS Education Award (2015) Graduate Education Award (2015) President of University Consortium for GIS (2017-2018) Computing Research Association Board Member (2016-2019) Professor Shekhar has advised over 30 PhD students since 1993, with his most recent graduate in 2023. He has secured significant research funding including a $20 million AI Institute grant focused on climate-smart agriculture and forestry. His Spatial Computing Research Group maintains active collaborations with government agencies and industry partners. The group has developed practical applications featured in media outlets including FoxTV coverage of evacuation route planning algorithms. Current research directions include applying AI techniques to address climate challenges through the AI-LEAF Institute and advancing spatial data science for polar regions through NSF-funded initiatives.
Jeremy Gibbons is a Professor of Computing at the University of Oxford, affiliated with the Department of Computer Science within the Faculty of Computer Science. He serves as Director of the Professional Programmes, overseeing part-time postgraduate degrees in Software Engineering. His roles include Chair of the Faculty of Computer Science (2012–2016), Director of the Software Engineering Programme, and Fellow of Kellogg College. Gibbons' research focuses on programming methodologies, particularly functional and object-oriented languages, with an emphasis on program calculation, design patterns, and bidirectional transformations. He leads the Algebra of Programming research group and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Functional Programming and The Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming . Education includes a D.Phil. from Oxford University. His work spans formal methods, domain-specific modeling for clinical trials (e.g., CancerGrid project), and semantic frameworks for software systems. He has advised numerous students and contributed to open-access initiatives in publishing. Key collaborations include roles in ACM SIGPLAN and IFIP Working Groups 2.1 and 2.11. Research interests emphasize foundational aspects like profunctor optics, categorical programming, and algorithm design. Notable projects include datatype-generic programming and metadata-driven engineering for clinical trials. His work bridges theoretical computer science with practical applications in software architecture and system design.
Phillip B. Gibbons is a Professor in both the Computer Science Department and Electrical & Computer Engineering Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989 and has held research positions at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Lucent Bell Laboratories, and Intel Research Pittsburgh before joining CMU's faculty. His research spans parallel computing, distributed systems, databases, computer architecture, and machine learning. Gibbons' work bridges theory and systems, with publications in top-tier conferences including SOSP, OSDI, SIGMOD, VLDB, NeurIPS, and many others across computer science and engineering disciplines. His research has been supported by significant funding from NSF, Intel, and other organizations. Gibbons has made substantial contributions to streaming algorithms, parallel computing frameworks, distributed systems security, and large-scale machine learning systems. His work on data stream algorithms with Alon, Matias, and Szegedy has been particularly influential in the field. He has served in numerous leadership roles including Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Parallel Computing (2012-2018) and on the editorial boards of Journal of the ACM and IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing. He has also been active on program committees for major conferences in systems, databases, and theory. IEEE Fellow (2014) - For contributions to parallel computing and databases ACM Fellow (2006) - For contributions to parallel computing, databases, and sensor networks Selected for Oral Presentation at NeurIPS '13 (only 20 selected out of 1420 submissions) Co-winner of the best paper award for NSDI '06 Gibbons has advised numerous students and mentored researchers who have gone on to make significant contributions in academia and industry. His research has been supported by major grants including the $15M Intel Science and Technology Center for Cloud Computing (2011-2015) where he served as Co-PI/Co-Director. He currently leads research projects on write-efficient algorithms, big learning systems, and visual cloud systems. His laboratory work focuses on bridging theoretical computer science with practical systems implementation, particularly in the areas of parallel and distributed computing. Current research directions include adapting algorithms for emerging memory technologies and optimizing machine learning systems for large-scale deployment.
Carlos Guestrin is the Fortinet Founders Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and serves as Director of the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI). He holds dual roles as Chief Scientist at Visual Layer and Virtue AI. His research focuses on machine learning methods, explainability, fairness, and ethics of AI, alongside systems for scalable AI deployment. Education details are not explicitly provided, but his work spans foundational contributions to machine learning systems (e.g., XGBoost) and explainable AI frameworks like Anchors and LIME. He emphasizes ethical AI through projects like CheckList for model testing and Model Equality Testing for API transparency. His scientific contributions include advancing optimization techniques (AdaScale SGD, TVM compiler) and ethical benchmarks for generative AI. He has been recognized as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering for his transformative impact on AI systems and their societal applications. Guestrin leads interdisciplinary initiatives at SAIL and HAI, fostering collaboration between technical innovation and human-centered design. His work bridges theory and practice, addressing challenges in healthcare (diabetes management systems) and AI security.
Henry F. (Hank) Korth is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh University, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Decision and Technology Analytics in the College of Business. He serves as Director of the Blockchain Lab in the Center for Financial Services and Co-Director of the Computer Science and Business Program. Korth is a Fellow of the ACM and IEEE, and a recipient of the VLDB 10-Year Award and Bell Labs President's Silver Award for contributions to database technologies. PhD in Computer Science from Princeton University MA, MSE in Computer Science from Princeton University BA in Mathematics from Williams College Korth's research spans database systems, blockchain systems, distributed systems, and real-time systems. He has pioneered transaction management in parallel and distributed systems, query processing, and the impact of modern computing architectures on database performance. His recent work focuses on blockchain applications in enterprise databases, including acceleration of zero-knowledge proofs, benchmarking frameworks, central-bank digital currencies, and private-yet-provable accounting systems. His contributions are rooted in both theoretical advancements and practical implementations, such as the QTM™ aggregation engine and the DataBlitz™ main-memory storage manager. Scientific awards include: ACM Fellow IEEE Fellow 10-Year Award at the VLDB Conference Bell Labs President's Silver Award Korth actively supervises research within the Blockchain Lab and is affiliated with the Scalable Software Systems Research Group at Lehigh. His scholarly output reflects a deep engagement with blockchain benchmarking, concurrency control, verifiable databases, and the evolution of database systems in response to technological shifts.
Matteo Magnani is a Professor in the Division of Computing Science at the Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University. He leads the Uppsala University Information Laboratory and is a founding member of the Uppsala University Computational Social Science Lab. His research spans network science, artificial intelligence, data science, and computational social science, with a focus on social data mining and multilayer networks. PhD in Computer Science, University of Bologna, 2006 Graduated with honours in Information Sciences, University of Bologna, 2002 Studies in Computer Science at University of Marne la Vallée and Imperial College London Matteo Magnani's research interests include social network analysis, multilayer and probabilistic networks, community detection, visual analytics, and the application of AI to digital media and climate communication. His work bridges computer science and social sciences, particularly in analyzing online discourse and digital intermediaries. He has contributed significantly to the understanding of network structures, uncertainty in networks, and the ethical dimensions of algorithmic analysis. His recent publications highlight trends in fairness in community detection, visual saliency in network layouts, emotional reactions to climate visuals online, and deep learning applications in social media. Topics frequently involve YouTube, Twitter, and online public debates, using advanced network and machine learning methods. Rotary Prize for best student of the Science Faculty Best Paper Award Funniest Presentation Award Best Poster Award Pedagogical Prize from UTN Distinguished University Teacher (Sweden) Docent title (Sweden) Magnani has supervised numerous students and collaborated widely, particularly with Luca Rossi, Alexandra Segerberg, and Davide Vega. He has secured funding from major sources including VR, H2020, STINT, and MIUR. He leads active research labs focused on information systems and computational social science, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation in network-based research.
