A Year of Accomplishments
Gerda L. Kamberova, PhD (Computer Science) Department of Computer Science Chairperson and Professor
Gerda.L.Kamberova@hofstra.edu
Dear Students:
Here we are, at the start of the new academic year, full of anticipation and excitement! You probably have heard the buzz about our new home, the Science & Innovation Center (SIC), providing state of the art educational and research facilities and ample space for students to study, interact or simply relax.
I would like to reflect on the past year and highlight the achievements of our faculty and students.
I am enthusiastic to introduce our new tenure-track faculty, Dr. John Ortega. Dr. Ortega holds an MS in Computer Science from Hofstra University and a PhD in Computer Science from the Universidad de Alacante in Spain. He studies natural language processing, machine translation, and low-resource languages, like Quechua, an indigenous language spoken in Peru by nearly eight million people He is a dynamic, experienced and dedicated teacher. Dr. Ortega also brings industry experience to his classes. He has held consultancy positions in multiple companies in both the United States and Europe Dr. Ortega was a senior Natural Language Processing (NLP) research scientist for AIG and Nuance Communications, and an Executive Director for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at JPMorgan Chase. He is an enthusiastic volunteer in his free time, organizing kids’ basketball tournaments, maintaining park grounds and rescuing elephants.
I am glad to report that Dr. Oren Segal is a tenure designee and promoted to Associate Professor. He will continue to serve our students and conduct his high power research. As a teacher, Dr. Segal emphasizes real-world scenarios that the students are likely to encounter, and information that they will likely find useful when working on complex projects He is a strong believer in hands-on experience and therefore his software and hardware design projects are practiced extensively in his classes. Dr. Segal’s main research interests revolve around parallel heterogeneous computing systems, hardware/software co-design of heterogeneous computing systems, and automated hardware/Neural Network Architecture (NNA) co-design of machine learning accelerators using multi-objective Neural Architecture Search (NAS).
Our most junior faculty, Dr. Jianchen Shan had a remarkably productive year: this summer, three of his papers were accepted in top-ranked journals and conferences in his field. These papers provide invaluable insights and solutions, contributing to the advancement of system performance and efficiency in the modern landscape of cloud computing.
His research is centered around enhancing the performance of data-intensive workloads in cloud environments. We were just informed that he is the recipient of an NSF grant to develop a high-performance cloud operating system, called Octopus OS, that can adapt to the dynamic cloud environment.
Our famed Dr. Xiang Fu was selected by students as Teacher of the Year (the first DeMatteis School faculty member to receive this award twice) in recognition of his effectiveness as a teacher and his ultimate dedication to the students. Numerous students have gone through his interview boot camp and some have landed coveted jobs at Google
or Amazon. Dr. Xiang Fu's research spans over the areas of formal methods, malware analysis and zero knowledge proof systems. His courses are often loaded with thrilling lab experiments that guide students in breaking systems apart (ethical hacking) and putting them back into one piece (provably secure systems). Many of his students achieve both great academic performance and career success.
For the first time our course CSC 159 Introduction to Robotics was offered jointly to computing and mechanical engineering students Dr. Kevin Craig from the Engineering Department designed the course to be taught to the interdisciplinary student body. Dr. Craig’s area of research is Mechatronics which is technology integration to achieve optimal system functionality Robotics is an interdisciplinary field which overlaps with Mechatronics, AI and Computer Science and Engineering more generally. The interdisciplinary approach Dr. Craig used in class is essential. In CSC 159, engineering and computer science junior/senior students worked in teams, learning the details of the modeling, analysis, and computer control/programming of the two most common robotic systems: the quadcopter and the three-link serial robot with end effector. The teams investigated and performed experiments with the actual systems which were built from scratch in the Mechatronics Studio In addition, each team had its own quadcopter with which to perform hovering and trajectory following tasks. This course will be offered again in Spring 2024.
Dr Krish and Professor Uzo Osuno, assisted by alumna Kavleen Kaur, taught a summer course as a part of the Break Through Tech/AI program which provides advanced and practical training for women and nonbinary students in deep learning and AI. Hofstra is the only satellite location in the country and will be a model for satellite locations in the future. The other sites are MIT, UCLA, and Cornell Tech. The Hofstra site was formed due to the initial efforts of President Poser and Dean Rabbany, while Dr. Krish arranged the logistics at the Hofstra site
Our students Sandro Amaglobeli, Mani Tofigh and Uriya Sabah were selected for the Dean of the Law School Legal-Tech Fellowship program along with three law school students to develop AI applications specifically for the legal profession. For their first project, this interdisciplinary group has been tasked with developing collaboratively a bilingual chatbot to guide users through the New York State Small Claims Court System and help the users file claims.
Computer science major, Luke Wyszynski, was awarded a Research Fellow scholarship from the Rabinowitz Honors College to work with Dr. Kamberova on the challenging problem of understanding deeper deep learning networks.
Again, the DeMatteis School of Engineering and Applied Science summer research program, ASPIRE, was a huge success and the final presentations demonstrated the ability of our students to tackle challenging research problems!
I would like to conclude by welcoming our new first-year and transfer students to the department! You are one of us! Work hard, challenge yourself, make the best of all that the Department of Computer Science and Hofstra University have to offer! Good luck!
Gerda Kamberova, PhD Department Chair Professor of Computer Science