June 28, 2016
The award-winning faculty of the UNC Department of Computer Science is growing by two. The department has announced the hiring of its two newest faculty members, Mohit Bansal and Don Porter, who will begin this fall.
Bansal comes to Chapel Hill from the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, where he has held a research assistant professorship for three years. He carries out research in statistical natural language processing and machine learning, with a focus on semantics (distributional, compositional, and multimodal), question answering and dialog, language generation, structured prediction, and neural networks. Bansal received a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013.
Prior to joining UNC, Porter was the Kieburtz Young Scholar in Computer Science at Stony Brook, holding the rank of assistant professor and leading the Operating systems, Security, Concurrency, and Architecture Research (OSCAR) Lab. Porter’s research develops better abstractions for managing concurrency and security, primarily in the operating system, and extends these abstractions to other portions of the technology stack as appropriate. He received a doctorate in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010.