The Computer Science Department welcomes three new faculty members

In fall 2018, the Computer Science Department has three new faculty members: Xi Peng, Seunghee Shin and Shiqi Zhang.

Xi Peng obtained his PhD degree in computer science from Rutgers University in 2018, his MS degree from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011 and his BS degree from Beihang University in 2008.

He was a research intern at NEC Labs America in 2016 and IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in 2015. During 2011 to 2012, he served as full-time staff at Baidu Research.

His research interests include deep learning, machine learning, and intelligent data analytics such as vision/language understanding. His research has resulted in a series of publications in top-ranked journals (TPAMI, IJCV, TIP), conferences (NIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, IJCAI), and US patents. His thesis research supports multiple research projects sponsored by NSF, NASA, and industry research labs. In 2016, his work won the best student paper runner-up in European Conference on Computer Vision.

Seunghee Shin received his PhD degree from Electrical and Computer Engineering department at North Carolina State University in 2018. He also has an MS degree in Computer Science from Northeastern University where he studied computer networks. He got his BS degree in Computer Engineering from Myongji University in South Korea.

His primary research interests lie in computer architecture and systems. Specifically, he has high interests in investigating the impact of emerging technologies on memory systems. His studies have turned out publications at renowned venues such as ISCA and MICRO. He also has more than five years of professional system software development experiences in multiple companies.

From 2016 to 2018, Shiqi Zhang was an assistant professor with Cleveland State University. From 2014 to 2016, he was a postdoctoral fellow working on a team of mobile service robots in a Building Wide Intelligence project at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his PhD in Computer Science (2013) from Texas Tech University. Before that, he received his Master’s (2008) and BS (2006) from Harbin Institute of Technology in China. He was a visiting student at Tsinghua University in 2007 and 2008 and interned at Microsoft Research Asia in 2012.

Zhang’s research lies in the intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics. He is particularly interested in developing algorithms that integrate computational modalities of planning, reasoning, and learning for service robots that work in human-inhabited, collaborative, everyday environments.