Dear Colleagues,
I’m pleased to share with you that our School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science has had an outstanding year. We continue to grow and thrive, and as we start the new year, we’re building new programs, our enrollment is increasing, we’re hiring faculty, and we’re growing our reputation with world-class research.
I’m excited that our new cybersecurity program will get underway this fall. Thanks to $2 million in support from the Washington State legislature, this program addresses the increasing challenges of keeping data secure in our interconnected world. The program will train our students throughout Washington in this critically important and fast-growing field.
In spite of the pandemic headwinds that have affected many programs, our enrollment has continued to grow. With a large number of tech employers headquartered in Washington, such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, demand for our graduates is higher than ever. In addition to the upcoming cybersecurity program, we offer our computer science, data analytics, electrical engineering, computer engineering, and software engineering degrees throughout Washington — in Pullman, Tri-Cities, Vancouver, Everett, and Bremerton.
To meet burgeoning need, we are also hiring several new faculty. This semester, we’re pleased to welcome Subu Kandaswamy, Monowar Hasan, and Nghia Hoang, and we are currently recruiting multiple faculty members.
Dr. Kandaswamy is an artificial intelligence researcher, joining us from Indian Institute of Information Technology, Sri City. He holds a PhD in computer science from Northwestern University. Dr. Hasan was an assistant professor at Wichita State University and will be conducting research in building trustworthy cyber-physical systems. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Hoang holds a PhD in computer science from National University of Singapore and has studied applications for machine learning in health care, collaborative machine learning, and optimization for automated machine learning. Before coming to WSU, he was a research scientist at Amazon Web Services AI Labs.
Our faculty and students also continue to do impactful research, especially in the areas of design automation, Machine learning and high-performance computing. Many of our faculty continue to attend important conferences, such as AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and the Design Automation Conference. We were very pleased to have received a best paper award at this year’s International Conference on Compilers, Architectures, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES), and Dr. Yan Yan has been selected for a new faculty highlight for AAAI-23. Among our power researchers, Mani Venkatasubramanian was named to the Washington Academy of Sciences, and two of our students, Ali Khan and Isobel Baetz, received prestigious IEEE Power and Energy Society scholarships this year.
We are excited to see what the next year holds and look forward to working to build this excellent program. Thank you, as always, for your support of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Go Cougs!
Sincerely,
Director
Boeing Centennial Chair
