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UT Dallas CS PhD Graduates Land Jobs at Prestigious Universities, Research Facilities, and Tech Conglomerates

In the 2015-16 academic year, the UT Dallas Computer Science Department graduated 14 PhD students, three of whom are women. These graduates have gone on to find jobs in prestigious universities, top tier research facilities, government, and high-tech companies. The UT Dallas Computer Science Department has graduated a total of 269 PhD students, including 53 women, since 2001. The computer science PhD program at UT Dallas has been in existence since the mid-70s. In fact, when the computer science program first started in the 70s, it only granted PhD degrees.

UT Dallas Professors Drs. Kevin Hamlen, Yang Liu, Haim Schweitzer, Vincent Ng, Zhiqiang Lin, Andrea Fumagalli, Murat Kantarcioglu, Jason Jue, Neeraj Mittal, I-Ling Yen, Andrian Marcus, and Farokh Bastani, served as faculty supervisors to these 14 UT Dallas Computer Science and Software Engineering doctoral graduates of the 2015-16 academic year.

These fourteen PhD graduates have obtained jobs at top companies such as Apple, Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, Google, IBM T.J. Watson, and more. Notably, PhD Graduate, Frederico Araujo, who this past May obtained his doctoral degree in Software Engineering at the Language-based Security Lab at UT Dallas under the supervision of Dr. Kevin Hamlen, received 12 tenure-track offers from U.S. universities, including several from universities ranked in the top-40. Finally, Frederico accepted a research position at the IBM T.J. Watson research center, one of the most well-known industrial research facilities in the world. The T. J. Watson center is the headquarters for IBM Research.

His dissertation “Engineering Cyber-Deceptive Software,” lays the foundation for a new science of cyber deceptive software engineering, which laces computer software implementations with fake vulnerabilities and traps to waylay and disinform attackers who try to subvert them.

The following includes a recent list of some of the recent PhD graduates, a description of their PhD work, title of their dissertation, faculty supervisor, accomplishments, and where they are currently working.

  • Dr. Chen Chen obtained his PhD this spring under the supervision of Dr. Vincent Ng. His research interests include Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. He is currently employed at Apple. Chen Chen interned at two companies: Bosch and Alibaba. While obtaining his PhD at UT Dallas, he published a dozen papers, including four papers at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and two at the Association for Computational Linguistic (ACL) conference. His Chinese co-reference resolution system achieved the highest score in CoNLL 2012 shared task. (Click here to see a list of papers he has had published while at UT Dallas) His dissertation was titled “Beyond Entity Co-reference: New Models for Resolving Zero and Event Anaphora.”
  • Dr. Rui Xia obtained her PhD in the fall of 2015, under the supervision of Dr. Yang Liu. Her PhD studies centered on emotion recognition based on speech, supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Young Investigator Program Award). She is currently employed at Intel.
  • Dr. Chen Li obtained his PhD in the spring of 2016 while under the supervision of Dr. Yang Liu. His PhD work focused on Natural Language Processing. His research centered around Social Media Language Processing, which included normalization of text messages, trending topic summarization of Twitter messages, the use of language models for better prediction in text message entry, sentence/post/thread analysis, and user participation analysis as well as user grouping. He is currently employed at Microsoft.
  • Dr. Yangchun Fu obtained his PhD during the Spring of 2016 while under the supervision of Dr. Zhiqiang Lin. Dr. Lin notes “Dr. Yangchun Fu is an excellent system security researcher with a superb publication record.” His research interests include software and system security as well as virtualization. He is currently employed with Google. (Click here to read his published papers)
  • Dr. Hiromasa Arai obtained his PhD in the fall of 2015 while under the supervision of Dr. Haim Schweitzer. His dissertation “Accuracy and Speed of Selecting Features from Data for Data Analytics,” investigates feature selection, a fundamental problem in machine learning and data mining. Exact solutions to this problem are known to be NP hard. Hiromasa discovered algorithms that enable practical exact solutions to small problems, and approximate solutions to large problems. His solutions are significantly more elegant than the current state of the art. His results were published in AAAI 2015 and AAAI 2016. (Click here to learn more about his published papers). He is currently employed with the Japanese Army.
  • Dr. Huseyin Ulusory obtained his PhD in the fall of 2015 while under the supervision of Dr. Murat Kantarcioglu. Currently, he is employed as a software developer at SAP Development Center in Istanbul, Turkey. In the course of his dissertation “Towards Accountable Big Data Management Systems”, Huseyin developed novel techniques for enforcing a wide range of security, privacy, and accountability policies for NoSQL databases such as Hadoop. (Click here to read his published papers)
  • Dr. Sangjin Hong obtained his PhD during the summer of 2016 while under the supervision of Dr. Jason Jue. His research involves designing virtual optical networks over multi-domain optical networks. He currently has one journal publication in IEEE/OSA Journal of Optical Communications and Networking, and five conference publications including IEEE ICC and IEEE Globecom. He will be joining St. Leo University in Tampa, Florida as a tenure-track faculty member.
  • Dr. Arunmoezhi Ramachandran obtained his PhD during the Spring of 2016 while under the supervision of Dr. Neeraj Mittal. His research interests include Concurrent Data Structures, Distributed Computing, High Performance Computing, and Cache Oblivious Algorithms. He has had his research published in numerous conference publications including International Conference on Parallel Processing (ICPP’13), ICDCN ’15 Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking, and the 2015 and 2016 PPoPP Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming. He is currently employed as a software engineer at Tableau Software in San Francisco.
  • Dr. Yufei Gu obtained his PhD during the Spring of 2016 under the supervision of Dr. Zhiqiang Lin. His research interests include System and Software Security, Cloud Computing, and Digital Forensics. He has published the results of his work in numerous conference publications including IEEE Transaction on Cloud Computing (TCC’14), ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SOCC’12), and European Symposium on Research in Computer Security (ESORICS’14). He is currently employed as a software engineer at Cloudera. (Click here to read his published papers)
  • Dr. Guang Zhou obtained his PhD during the Summer of 2016 under the supervision of Dr. Farokh Bastani. Dr. Guang Zhou’s research centered on the development, deployment, and evaluation of a very high quality Automated UAV based Power Line Inspection System. Based on this research, he received the 1st place award in the DJI Developer Challenge Competition. Zhou also worked on the Autonomous Agriculture Robotic System Project called the Agribot Project. Texas Instruments reported on this news on their website; read more about it here. Dr. Zhou is employed at Baidu USA in San Francisco as a Research Scientist in the Baidu Autonomous Driving Group.
  • Dr. Jinwei Yuan obtained his PhD during the Spring of 2016 while under the supervision of Drs. Farokh Bastani and I-Ling Yen. His research involves image processing, primarily for real-time object tracking. Jinwei received the Top 10% Award at the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing. Leveraging his innovative research, he is currently working as a software engineer in the Google Image Processing Research Team.
  • Dr. Yamini Navaratna Jayabal, who obtained her PhD this summer under the supervision of Dr. Andrea Fumagalli. While obtaining her PhD, Yamini did a 6-month internship with Cisco. During her time interning at Cisco, she worked to help define and solve critical technical problems that Cisco and other companies are facing today. Dr. Jayabal is now currently employed with Cisco.
  • Dr. Laura Moreno obtained her PhD in Software Engineering this Summer under the supervision of Dr. Andrian Marcus. She will start as Assistant Professor at Colorado State University in Fall 2016. During her job search, she had 13 campus interviews, including: Carnegie Mellon University, Arizona State University, McGill University, University of Waterloo, etc. She received six offers, before accepting the one at CSU. Her work has been published in numerous conference papers including the IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC’13), the International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE’14), and the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’15). You can read her Summer 2016 interview with the UT Dallas CS Department here.
  • Dr. Frederico Araujo obtained his doctoral degree this past may in Software Engineering at the Language-based Security Lab at UT Dallas under the supervision of Dr. Kevin Hamlen, received 12 tenure-track offers from U.S. universities, including several from universities ranked in the top-40. Finally, Frederico accepted a research position at the IBM T.J. Watson research center, one of the most well-known industrial research facilities in the world. The T. J. Watson center is the headquarters for IBM Research.

If you would like to read more in-depth interviews with Drs. Laura Moreno and Frederico Araujo about their research, reasons for pursuing a PhD at the UT Dallas CS Department, and what their plans for the future include, Click here for Dr. Moreno and Click here for Dr. Araujo.

ABOUT THE UT DALLAS COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT

The UT Dallas Computer Science program is one of the largest Computer Science departments in the United States with over 1,600 bachelor’s-degree students, more than 1,100 master’s students, 160 PhD students, and 80 faculty members, as of Fall 2015. With The University of Texas at Dallas’ unique history of starting as a graduate institution first, the CS Department is built on a legacy of valuing innovative research and providing advanced training for software engineers and computer scientists.