In general terms, what does your research consist of? How would you explain it to a class of freshmen?

My research is focused on hardware-based, autonomous decision-making systems with online learning capabilities and their application to intelligent robotic vision. I am currently involved in the development of surgeon-assistive tools for predicting the outcome of anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction in orthopedic patients.

What drew you to your field of study and to being a professor?

As a teenager I was attracted to computers and coding. Later on, I was eager to learn how these machines are designed and built. It led me to focus my academic career on IC design and later to research semiconductor devices. I feel that as a professor I have many more degrees of freedom to evolve and develop. In addition, I enjoy both research and teaching.

What have you learned from your work that surprised you?

We often find ourselves in a situation where our field of research chooses us rather than we choose it.

Read more Q & A’s from Dr. Barkan

In general terms, what does your research consist of? How would you explain it to a class of freshmen?

My research focuses on security and privacy on the Web. The Web is a big part of our daily lives, offering us a wealth of services and applications. However, as technology gets more advanced, hackers also find new ways to break into our online accounts and access our personal information without permission. These attacks can cause serious problems for individuals and organizations. Therefore, my objectives are to investigate the Web’s threat landscape and develop effective countermeasures to enhance user protection.

What have you learned from your work that surprised you?

“The Internet gave us access to everything; but it also gave everything access to us.”- James Veitch

If you could name one person who inspires you, who would it be and why?

My grandmother, Xueru Gong, was my first teacher. She showered me with unconditional love. She taught me valuable life lessons like playing chess and poker, overcoming my fear of spiders, and caring for bunnies. Her wisdom, kindness, and sense of humor constantly motivate me to improve and become a better person.

Read more Q & A’s from Dr. Lin

In general terms, what does your research consist of? How would you explain it to a class of freshmen?

My research focuses on cryptography, which is aimed at ensuring the security of data communication and computation. The primary objective of my work is to enhance the fundamental principles and techniques in order to develop secure systems with increased confidence while also improving their efficiency.

A crucial aspect of my research involves designing a new cryptographic foundation that can withstand the threats posed by quantum computing, which has the potential to break traditional cryptographic methods. Given the considerable progress in building large-scale quantum computers, it has become imperative to explore and develop new cryptographic methods suitable for the post-quantum era.

Additionally, there are various other intriguing research directions that I am investigating. These include finding ways to perform computations on encrypted data without the need to decrypt it first, devising methods to prove the validity of a statement without revealing the underlying “secret trick,” and developing techniques for jointly computing a function for multiple parties without disclosing their respective inputs to each other…
Read more Q & A’s from Dr. Liu

In general terms, what does your research consist of? How would you explain it to a class of freshmen?

My general interest is on making computing systems operate with lower energy, provide higher performance while being more reliable and secure. Lower energy contributes to greener environment. Higher performance enables us to solve more problems using computer. Reliability permits the computing infrastructure to be available all the time. Secure systems protect information stored and processed from unfriendly actors acquiring them. My specific research interests focus on architecting memory for the four goals on energy, performance, reliability and security.

What drew you to your field of study and to being a professor?

I went into Computer Architecture due to a professor, Dave Patterson, at Berkeley when I was an undergraduate student. Prior to taking that course I majored in electronics. The course was on Digital Design and Computer Architecture. I felt in love after the class which taught me how to design a processor from ground up and how to use it to solve problems. After graduating with a PhD degree, I wanted to do research on making better computing systems.

Read more Q & A’s from Dr. Lu

In general terms, what does your research consist of? How would you explain it to a class of freshmen?

My research aims to develop efficient data-driven algorithms for online learning and decision-making problems, particularly with constraints. I primarily focus on three areas: 1) the theory and applications of safe reinforcement learning, 2) sample-efficient reinforcement learning algorithms, and 3) reinforcement learning algorithms applied to large-scale systems.
When explaining my research to freshmen, I like to begin with captivating real-world success stories and examples of reinforcement learning. For instance, I discuss the use of reinforcement learning to play Atari games, its application in robotics, the groundbreaking achievement of AlphaGo, and other notable examples. I believe these illustrations can effectively help students grasp the concepts, ignite their curiosity, and capture their interests.

What drew you to your field of study and to being a professor?

The main reasons that drew me to my field are curiosity, passion, and a desire to make a positive impact. Initially, in the early stages of my research, I focused on developing novel and scalable data-driven approaches for decision-making problems…
Read more Q & A’s from Dr. Wei

In general terms, what does your research consist of?

During my Ph.D. programming, I mainly focused on addressing the fault tolerance challenge for data staging and in-situ workflows in high-performance computing (HPC) systems. While rooted in HPC research, my most recent work is related to fault tolerance and system reliability for storage systems, specifically key-value stores.

Fault tolerance is important for both HPC and storage systems, and they share some common concerns and methodologies to address challenges. Actually, I try to leverage previous research experience in the HPC area to explore fault tolerance approaches for distributed storage systems and single storage systems. As a new faculty in the computer systems area, my vision is to build fault-tolerance and robust storage systems that function correctly and deliver high performance on all emerging platforms and hardware.
Read more Q & A’s from Dr. Duan