Meet the new Berkeley CS Faculty

Five new professors will join the U.C. Berkeley Computer Science division in July 2019.

Alvin Cheung

Assistant Prof. Alvin Cheung comes from the Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington (UW). He was affiliated with the database and programming languages & software engineering research groups, as well as the eScience Institute. His research interests include program analysis, program synthesis, improving database application performance, and building big systems in general.  In particular, he has applied a new technique to infer the properties of programs, called verified lifting, to database applications (QBS), stencil computations (STING), programmable switches (Domino), parallel data processing frameworks (Casper) and the SandCat project. He has also been leveraging programming language techniques to build and optimize data management systems (Cosette, Hyperloop, and LightDB), and improving end user programming across different domains (CodeNN, Concode, and Scythe).

Cheung received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2015 where he was a member of the database group and the computer-aided programming group.

Hany Farid

Prof. Hany Farid will have a joint appointment in CS and the School of Information (I-School). He joined the computer science faculty of Dartmouth in 1999 and was the director of the Neukom Institute for Computational Science from 2008-11. His research focuses on digital forensics, image analysis, and human perception. His primary area of expertise is in developing techniques to analyze and authenticate digital content. He has also developed and deployed technology for combating the global distribution of child exploitation and extremism-related material. He is a Senior Advisor to the Counter Extremism Project and was the CTO and co-founder of Fourandsix Technologies, a San Jose-based computer software company that specialized in digital photo forensics. Fourandsix was acquired by Truepic in 2018.

Farid received his M.S. in Computer Science from SUNY Albany in 1992 and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. He joined Dartmouth following a two year post-doctoral fellowship in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.

Nilah Ioannidis

Assistant Prof. Nilah Ioannidis will have a joint appointment in CS and the Center for Computational Biology. She was a postdoc in the Department of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford working on statistical and computational methods for interpreting personal genomes. She develops machine learning tools to predict the clinical significance of rare variants of unknown significance from whole genome sequencing studies, as well as statistical methods to link personal genetic variation with personal transcriptome variation.

Ioannidis earned her M.Phil. in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge in 2005 and her Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard in 2013. During her graduate studies, she worked in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT and developed methods using hidden Markov modeling and Bayesian inference to analyze the dynamics of intracellular particles. She previously served as Research Director at the Jain Foundation, focused on the rare genetic disease dysferlinopathy, and held internships at the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal Science.

Jelani Nelson

Prof. Jelani Nelson was an associate professor of both computer science and engineering & applied sciences at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). He was a member of the Theory of Computation group. His research focuses on the development of efficient algorithms for massive datasets, especially algorithms that use little memory and require only a single or few passes over the data (so-called “streaming algorithms”).  He has done research in sketching — a technique used to create a very compressed version of a dataset — applied to several areas, including streaming, dimensionality reduction, compressed sensing, and numerical linear algebra. The applications of this work could help improve computational tools in fields like computer vision, machine learning, databases, and data mining.

Nelson has an M.Eng. (2006) and Ph.D. (2011) in Computer Science from MIT. He was a postdoc at the Princeton Center for Computational Intractibility as well as in the Program in Quantitative Geometry at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.

Aditya Parameswaran

Assistant Prof. Aditya Parameswaran will have a joint appointment in CS and the I-School, and plans to be involved in the new Division of Data Sciences. He comes from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he developed systems and algorithms for “human-in-the-loop” data analytics, synthesizing techniques from database systems, data mining, and human computation. His research themes include visual analytics, crowd-powered analytics, interactive analytics, information extraction and integration, and recommender systems.

Parameswaran received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2013 and spent a year as a postdoc at the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).