The 四虎影视 Bellini College of Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity and Computing will officially launch on Aug. 25, powered by an ambitious mission, a transformational gift and a high-caliber team of researchers and educators.
Fourteen newly hired faculty are joining the college, bringing expertise in machine learning, trustworthy artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, hardware systems and biomedical applications. They join 56 faculty, many from the computer science and engineering area, form the academic and administrative core of the new college.
鈥淭his group of new faculty brings outstanding scholarly credentials, a passion for teaching and research agendas that are already gaining national recognition,鈥� said Sudeep Sarkar, launch dean for the college.
While the college鈥檚 innovative hub-and-spoke model means there are no departments, the new faculty鈥檚 areas of expertise can be clustered in a few key areas:
Building the foundations of AI
Professor Chandra Kambhamettu brings deep expertise in computer vision, artificial intelligence, deep learning and biomedical image analysis. His work has advanced fields such as optical flow estimation, 3D modeling, dynamic scene understanding and biomedical image analysis.鈥� With a long history of federal research funding and interdisciplinary collaboration, Kambhamettu recently received the 鈥淭est of Time鈥� award from the Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, recognizing his lasting impact on the field. He is also a National Science Foundation CAREER award winner.
New hires Fengchun Qiao, Yi Sheng, Utkarsh Ojha, Shichen Zhang and Anowarul Kabir, all assistant professors, have similar areas of expertise and are using AI to drive discovery in healthcare, biology and smart environments.
Qiao is developing models that are robust under shifting data conditions, ensuring they remain trustworthy in such safety-critical fields as autonomous driving, medical imaging and satellite-based flood detection. Ojha鈥檚 work investigates the fundamental differences between AI-generated and human-generated content and explores the implications of increasingly blurred boundaries between them. Sheng focuses on applying AI to electronic design automation, medical image computing and AI fairness, with a focus on developing energy-efficient, fair and practical AI systems for medical applications and devices.
Kabir specializes in AI-enabled biological discovery, using machine learning, deep learning and foundation models to unlock new insights from molecular biology data. Zhang鈥檚 work blends innovative AI with wireless systems to enable new forms of interaction between people and technology, with his most recent work focusing on integrating advanced AI technologies into wireless communication systems. Assistant Professor of Instruction FNU Kaleemunnisia鈥檚 expertise interests lie at the intersection of natural language processing, machine learning, computer vision and AI, with a focus on applications in biotechnology, environmental sustainability, generative AI for the fashion industry, software engineering and education.
Securing the digital frontier
Several other new faculty are advancing secure, trustworthy systems. Assistant Professor Amit Seal Ami bridges cybersecurity and software engineering, with a focus on evaluating and improving the automated analysis techniques used to detect vulnerabilities in software systems. Nima Karimian, also an NSF CAREER award winner and a new assistant professor, has served as principal investigator on multiple National Science Foundation-funded projects and brings a dual focus on hardware security and biometric AI. His research addresses issues of privacy, security and fairness in biometric systems鈥攚ork that is vital to the widespread adoption of trustworthy AI technologies. Assistant Professor of Instruction MD Rabbi Alam鈥檚 interests can be clustered into three key areas: Internet of Things security, cloud security and machine learning. Assistant Professor of Instruction Kurt Friday鈥檚 expertise spans hardware-accelerated security, forensics and machine learning, as well as programmable networks. His applied approach prepares students for careers in high-demand areas of national security and critical infrastructure protection.
Engineering high-performance systems
Behind every AI breakthrough and security innovation is a system capable of powering it. Jiajun Huang, Santosh Pandey and Shareef Ahmed, all assistant professors, bring expertise in this area. Huang specializes in designing efficient software systems for large-scale computing environments, such as those needed to run AI models and scientific simulations on supercomputers and multi-node data centers. Pandey brings experience at Google and multiple national labs. He explores how intelligent models can accelerate the evaluation and design of next-generation hardware, allowing researchers and developers to simulate computer performance. Ahmed鈥檚 research sits at the intersection of computer systems and theoretical computer science. He develops foundational approaches to make cyber-physical systems, such as self-driving cars and autonomous drones, more predictable, dependable and safe.
鈥淭heir work spans critical areas and they share a commitment to engaging students and advancing knowledge that serve society,鈥� Sarkar said. 鈥淭heir work will drive innovation, inform policy and create new solutions to in fields that are rapidly advancing, ones that are changing the world! Just as importantly, their teaching will help build the highly skilled workforce our region and nation urgently need to keep up with these transformative changes.鈥�