The Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering’s numerous interdisciplinary research opportunities have drawn impressive faculty to the Computer Science department that will boost its emphasis on security research while benefiting students.
Two assistant professors, Thai Le and Hyungsub Kim, and two lecturers, Sakher Alqaaidi and Andrew Holland, joined the department for the 2024-25 academic year.
Also, Associate Professor Feng Chen, whose research focuses on systems, and Assistant Professor Suprovat Ghoshal, whose research area is in algorithms, will start in January.
“I am so happy to welcome all the new people to the Bloomington campus,” said Yuzhen Ye, Computer Science chair and professor of Informatics and Computer Science. Their joining will strengthen our research in multiple areas and bring new research and industrial experience into the classrooms.”
Le said the reason he chose to come to Luddy was its interdisciplinary research advantage.
“Luddy has a significant number of high-quality interdisciplinary research activities going on with actual impacts on life,” Le said. “I wanted to join a more interdisciplinary school. Luddy is really the answer.”
Le got his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Penn State University in 2022. He spent two years as an assistant professor at Ole Miss. His research includes artificial intelligence and machine learning, natural language processing, security and privacy, and security informatics.
“My key research is trustworthy machine learning, especially for natural language processing models and their application in high-stake scenarios such as cybersecurity. I hope to make large-language-models like ChatGPT safer in real-life applications by bringing more clarity to its complex behaviors.”
Le teaches CSCI-B 651 Natural Language Processing.
Kim received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Purdue in 2023. His research centers on system security and cyber-physical systems security. He teaches CSCI-B 544 Security for Networked Systems.
Ye said Kim’s “joining will further strengthen our research in security, now expanding into the cybersecurity for autonomous drones.”
Alqaaidi earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Georgia. His research centers on knowledge graphs, natural language processing, text mining, artificial intelligence and data science. He has had multiple published papers on topics such as knowledge graph completion using large language models and a hybrid approach for web change detection.
Alqaaidi teaches CSCI-B 405 Applied Algorithms, and CSCI-C 323 Mobile App Development.
Holland got his master’s in Computer Science at the Luddy School. He has worked as a software engineer. His interests center on identity, security and privacy. It ranges from cryptographic foundations to establish trust, to understanding privacy concerns for individuals to implementing systems for logins. He teaches CSCI-A 541, Computing and Technology Bootcamp, and CSCI-C292 Mobile App Development.