UTD CS Alumni Working as Faculty Members at ASU Earn Accolades
Dr. Ajay Bansal, a 2007 UT Dallas PhD graduate who now is employed as an Assistant Professor in the Software Engineering program in the School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering (CIDSE) at Arizona State University (ASU), was recently awarded (2019) the Teaching Excellence Award by the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU. Each year the School (with 20,000+ students and 500+ faculty) recognizes excellence in instruction by awarding an annual Teaching Excellence Award to a single professor. A faculty committee reviews student nominations and feedback in determining the honoree.
In addition to this school-wide 2019 teaching excellence current award, Dr. Bansal has received numerous other teaching awards in the past few years, including the 2018 and 2015 Best Teacher Award (Top 5%) in the Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU and the 2013 Best Teacher Award in the Department of Engineering within the College of Technology and Innovation at ASU.
Dr. Bansal works with his wife Dr. Srividya K. Bansal, tenured associate professor in theSoftware Engineering program in School of Computing, Informatics, and Decision Systems Engineering (CIDSE), at ASU where she also serves as program chair of their Software Engineering program. In 2007, Both obtained their Ph.D. in Computer Science from UT Dallas while under the supervision of Dr. Gopal Gupta, UT Dallas CS Department head. “I remember that both Drs. Ajay and Srividya Bansal were passionate about teaching and that was one of the main reasons they wanted to obtain a Phd,” remarked Dr. Gupta, “Both of them are living out their dream, which is outstanding. Not many people can say that!”
Prior to joining ASU, both Drs. Bansal were visiting assistant professors at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. In addition, Dr. Ajay Bansal worked in the industry for four years as a software engineer at SIEMENS India, Tyler Technologies and Metallect Corporation. Dr. Srividya Bansal worked in the industry for five years as a Software Engineer at SAP Labs India and Tyler Technologies in Plano, TX.
Dr. Ajay Bansal’s primary research focuses on Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Commonsense Reasoning, Semantics and implementation of declarative programming languages and Machine Learning. Dr. Srividya Bansal’s primary research focuses on semantic computing for data integration on the Web, handling heterogeneity & variety in Big Data, semantic search & querying of Big Data, Web service description, discovery & composition, and representation of knowledge around outcome-based instruction design in STEM education. Her work has been published in several conferences and journals in the area of Semantic Computing, Big Data, and Services Computing. She currently works in the field of curriculum design in Engineering Education (funded by National Science Foundation) and Software Engineering Education research that focuses on various delivery models for team-based project-centric courses.
Ajay and Srividya’s research at UT Dallas resulted in two awards as well: the Test-of-Time award at the International Logic Programming Conference (ICLP) in 2016 and the conference best paper award at the European Conference on Web Services (ECOWS) in 2005.
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 3,315 bachelors-degree students, more than 1,110 master’s students, 165 Ph.D. students, 52 tenure-track faculty members, and 44 full-time senior lecturers, as of Fall 2019. 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.