University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The Grainger College of Engineering
Computer Science

Graduating PhD Students

Graduating PhD students may add themselves to this page by completing this form.

Angello Astorga
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Formal Methods
      • Software Engineering
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Mining Specifications Modulo a Test Generator via Symbolic Analysis and Learning Algorithms
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Tao Xie
Pedro Bello-Maldonado
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Numerical Methods
      • High-Performance Computing
      • Scientific Computing
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Polynomial Reductiong with Full Domain Decomposition Preconditioner for Spectral Element Poisson Solvers
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 12/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Paul F. Fischer
Shant Boodaghians
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Computational Economics
      • Algorithms for Noisy Data
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Limited-Information Problems in Computational Economics
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Prof. Ruta Mehta
Xiaohong Chen
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Programming Languages
      • Formal Methods
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Matching Logic
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Grigore Rosu
Sarah Ashley Christensen
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Optimization
      • Computational Biology
      • Algorithms
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Algorithms for Phylogenetic Tree Correction in Species and Cancer Evolution
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 12/2020
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Mohammed El-Kebir and Tandy Warnow
Pubali Datta
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Auditing and Threat Analytics
      • Serverless Platform Security
      • System Security and Privacy
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Defending against Emerging Threats in Serverless Computing
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Adam Bates
Himel Dev
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Economics
      • Applied Machine Learning
      • Data Science
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Modeling the Successes and Failures of Content Based Platforms
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Prof. Hari Sundaram
Saikat Dutta
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Testing Machine Learning Software
      • Software Engineering
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Testing Machine Learning Libraries in the Presence of Randomness
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Sasa Misailovic
Tanmay Gangwani
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Deep Learning
      • Reinforcement Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Methods for Efficient Imitation and Exploration in Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jian Peng
Wajih Hassan
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Data Provenance
      • Intrusion Detection
      • Forensic Analysis
      • System Security
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Towards Effective Threat Detection and Investigation with Provenance Analytics
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Adam Bates
Abdulrahman Hassan N Mahmoud
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Computer Systems and Architecture
      • Hardware Resiliency
      • Approximate Computing
      • Machine Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Towards Scalable and Specialized Application Error Analysis
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 12/2020
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Sarita Adve
Emily Marie Hastings
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Computer-Supported Cooperative Work
      • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Supporting Instructor Decisions on Algorithmic Team Formation through Integrating Stakeholder Voices
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Teaching
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Brian Bailey
Gaurush Hiranandani
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Classification, Ranking, Recommendation
      • Metric Elicitation
      • Statistical Machine Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Classification Performance Metric Elicitation
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Prof. Sanmi Koyejo
Suraj Jog
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Applied AI/ML for Wireless Networks
      • IoT and Low Power WANs
      • RF Sensing
      • Wireless Networking
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • SCALABLE MILLIMETER WAVE WIRELESS NETWORKS
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2022
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Prof. Haitham Hassanieh
Mitchell Francis Jones
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Randomized & approximation algorithms
      • Computational geometry
      • Theoretical computer science
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • On the Search for Geometric Orders, Centers, and Separation
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Sariel Har-Peled
Adit Krishnan
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Graph Mining, User Modeling, NLP
      • Recommendation Systems, Info Retrieval
      • Deep Learning and Neural Networks
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • User-Centric Deep Learning Methods and Applications
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Hari Sundaram
Hsuan-Chi Kuo
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • System security
      • Operating system
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Attack Surface Reduction in Contemporary Operating Systems via Practical Kernel Debloating
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2022
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Sibin Mohan
Wing Lam
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Software engineering
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Software Testing in a Nondeterministic World
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Darko Marinov and Tao Xie
Yi-Chieh Lee
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • CSCW
      • Conversational AI
      • Social computing
      • Human-centered AI
      • Human-computer interaction
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Designing Conversational Agents to Promote Self-disclosure and Behavior Change
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Yun Huang
Linyi Li
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Security
      • Machine Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Enabling large-scale certifiably trustworthy deep learning systems
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Bo Li and Tao Xie
Patrick Lin
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Computational Topology
      • Computational Geometry
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Equilibrium Graphs on Flat Tori
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Teaching
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jeff Erickson
Shelby L. Lockhart
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • High Performance Computing
      • Scientific Computing
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Reducing Communication Bottlenecks in Iterative Solvers
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Luke Olson
Ian G. Ludden
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Algorithmic Game Theory
      • Operations Research
      • Theory & Algorithms
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Graph Partitioning: Redistricting Games and the Spherical Zoning Problem
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Teaching
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Sheldon Jacobson
Haoran Qiu
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • ML for Systems
      • Cloud Computing
      • Distributed Systems
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Efficient and Robust Online Learning in Cloud Datacenters
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Ravishankar K. Iyer
Adam James Stewart
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Geospatial Data
      • Remote Sensing
      • Machine Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Applications of Geospatial Deep Learning
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2023
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Arindam Banerjee
Rohan Tabish
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Predictability and Fault-Tolerance
      • Real-Time and Safe AI
      • Cyber-Physical Systems
      • Real Time and Embedded Systems
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • DESIGNING SAFETY-CRITICAL SYSTEMS USING COTS BASED HOMOGENEOUS AND HETEROGENEOUS MULTI-CORE PROCESSORS
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Marco Caccamo
Xuan Wang
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • BioNLP
      • Biomedical Text Mining
      • Natural Language Processing
      • Data Mining
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Minimum Supervised Text Mining for Literature-based Scientific Discovery
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2022
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jiawei Han
Sam White
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • High Performance Computing
      • Scientific Computing
      • Parallel Computing
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • A Virtualized MPI Implementation Optimized for Shared Memory Systems
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 12/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Laxmikant (Sanjay) Kale
Jun Wu
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Data Mining
      • Heterogeneous Machine Learning
      • Trustworthy Transfer Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Toward Understanding Trustworthy Transfer Learning
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2024
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Prof. Jingrui He
Ziang Xiao
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Natural Language Processing
      • Interactive Computing
      • Behavioral Science Research
      • Conversational AI
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Improving Survey Methods with Conversational AI
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2022
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Hari Sundaram; Karrie Karahalios
Cong Xie
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Federated Learning
      • Distributed System
      • Machine Learning
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Toward Communication-Efficient and Secure Distributed Machine Learning
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 5/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Oluwasanmi Koyejo, Indranil Gupta
Le Xu
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Distributed Systems and Cloud Computing
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Elastic Techniques Mitigating Dynamism In Distributed Systems
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
    • Industry - Development
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Indranil Gupta
Carl Yang
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Applied machine learning
      • Network data science
      • Graph data mining
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Multi-Facet Graph Mining with Contextualized Projections
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
    • Industry - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 12/2020
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jiawei Han
Dawei Zhou
  • Areas of Expertise:
      • Rare Category Analysis
      • Machine Learning
      • Data Mining
  • Dissertation Topic:
    • Harnessing Rare Category Trinity for Complex Data
  • Preferred Employment:
    • Academia - Research
  • Expected Graduation Date:
    • 8/2021
  • Thesis Advisor:
    • Jingrui He