October 5, 2022
The 2022 academic year brings three new additions to the UNC Computer Science faculty. These new faculty members bring experience in both research and teaching and contribute to the department’s mission of maintaining academic excellence in an inclusive environment.
Benjamin Berg
Benjamin Berg joined the department as an assistant professor. He works in the area of performance modeling, using stochastic models to optimize real-world computer systems. He has applied this approach to a variety of resource allocation problems, including the scheduling of parallelizable jobs and caching for large-scale web services. Berg’s work earned him a Best Paper Award at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) 2021.
He received a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in 2022. He completed his undergraduate degree nearby at Duke University in Durham, NC.
Sayeed Ghani
Sayeed Ghani joined the department as a teaching associate professor. He has undertaken research involving applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, wireless sensor networks, and the Internet-of-Things.
Ghani has previously worked for the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi in Pakistan, serving as chairman for the Center for Computer Studies, as well as professor and associate dean of the faculty of computer science, member of the Board of Governors, interim acting dean, and director. He also has over 12 years of industry experience. He has worked at GTE Labs (now Verizon LTE Innovation Center) and the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (now MIT CS & AI Lab) in the US and with Unilever in Pakistan.
Ghani received a doctorate from Columbia University in 1990.
Roni Sengupta
Roni Sengupta joined the department as an assistant professor. Her research interest lies at the intersection of computer vision and computer graphics, with a focus on solving inverse graphics problems for democratizing high-quality video production and editing.
Sengupta most recently worked as a postdoctoral researcher with the Graphics and Imaging Laboratory (GRAIL) at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her work on background matting received Best Student Paper, Honorable Mention at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2021 and has been adopted by companies including Microsoft and Inter-State Studio.
She received a doctorate from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2019.