August 7, 2024
The Department of Computer Science is excited to announce a new department chair and several additions to the faculty ahead of its 60th academic year. Demand for computer science education continues to grow at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, and UNC Computer Science is constantly working to elevate the standard of education and research.
New Department Chair
Kenan Distinguished Professor James H. “Jim” Anderson has been appointed chair of the Department of Computer Science, effective August 1. Anderson has been a computer science faculty member at UNC since 1993. Prior to that, he completed a doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990 and spent three years as a faculty member at the University of Maryland.
Anderson is an accomplished researcher in the areas of real-time scheduling and synchronization, cyber-physical systems, distributed and concurrent algorithms, and experimental evaluation of real-time resource allocation mechanisms. He leads the UNC Real-Time Systems Group, with which he has co-authored numerous best paper award winners from conferences related to real-time systems and distributed computing.
He is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA). He has chaired the IEEE Technical Committee on Real-Time Systems (TCRTS) and ACM Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems (SIGBED). In 2018, he received the TCRTS Outstanding Technical Achievement and Leadership Award.
In addition to his accomplishments as a researcher, Anderson has been recognized seven times with the department’s Computer Science Student Association Excellence in Teaching Award, given annually to an outstanding teacher of graduate-level courses based on a vote of the department’s graduate students. He has advised 30 doctoral graduates and a dozen master’s graduates at UNC.
Anderson’s term as chair comes at an exciting time. Headed into its 60th year, the department has recently expanded its master’s program, implemented an admissions process to manage demand for the undergraduate program, and contributed to the development of the School of Data Science and Society. The department’s research will continue to play an important role in technological advancements going forward.
New Faculty
Assistant Professors
Tianlong Chen joined UNC after finishing a doctoral program at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on building accurate and responsible machine learning (ML) systems. He devotes his most recent passion to learning with sparsity, which tightly connects to various important topics including ML model efficiency, reliability, learning to optimize, and interdisciplinary scientific challenges such as bioengineering and quantum computing.
Zhun Deng comes to UNC from Columbia University, where he was a postdoctoral researcher. Previously, he completed a doctorate from the Theory of Computation Group at Harvard University. His research investigates both the theoretical foundations and applications of reliable and responsible machine learning.
Mingyu Ding was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley before joining UNC. Prior to that, he was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and obtained his doctorate from the University of Hong Kong. His research objective is to develop robots and embodied agents that can perceive, reason about, and interact effectively with the 3D physical world like humans, via the integration of insights from interdisciplinary domains including robotics, vision and language, and brain science.
Julia Len received a doctorate from Cornell University prior to joining UNC. Her research interests are broadly in the areas of applied cryptography and computer security. She has also worked at Zoom and Microsoft on cryptographic protocol designs which are being considered for deployment in their video calling products.
Raghavendra “Raghav” Pothukuchi joined UNC from Yale University, where he was an associate research scientist. He received a doctorate in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research is on brain-computer interfaces, quantum and classical frameworks to accelerate cognitive models, and biologically inspired computer architectures. He also has interdisciplinary work on building intelligent and secure computer systems using control theory and machine learning.
Teaching Assistant Professors
Prairie Rose Goodwin has served as an assistant professor of computer science at Vassar College, where she has taught courses on data structures, algorithms, and operating systems, as well as mentored students on career development. She has over ten years of industry experience, most recently as a senior product developer in the IoT division at SAS. She is a usability expert who brings data science and quantitative analysis to questions formerly answered with qualitative data, publishing extensively on how to use the limits of human perception and cognition to make better tools and increase productivity in developer workflows.
Isabella “Izzi” Hinks joined UNC after finishing a doctoral program with North Carolina State University’s Center for Geospatial Analytics. She earned bachelor’s degrees in computer science and environmental science from UNC, where she served as an undergraduate learning assistant for large-enrollment introductory computer science courses, helped pilot a course called Data Science for Earth, and taught for Girls Who Code. Hinks has nearly a decade of experience introducing computational thinking, programming, and algorithms to learners of all ages and backgrounds.