Professor Miryung Kim’s former PhD student Tianyi Zhang is joining Purdue University as a tenure track faculty member in 2021 Fall. Zhang was a PhD student in UCLA Computer Science from 2014 to 2019. Since then, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, working with Elena Glassman. Zhang’s research focuses on Human-Centered Software Engineering. This field of study specializes in building interactive systems to augment human intelligence with data-driven insights and augment machine intelligence by eliciting and incorporating domain expertise. He is joining Purdue CS’s new focus to strengthen AI supporting technologies.
Zhang is the 5th tenure-track faculty that Professor Kim has produced: Baishakhi Ray at Columbia University (UT Austin PhD 2013), Na Meng at Virginia Tech (UT Austin PhD 2014), Myoungkyu Song at U. Nebraska (Postdoc 2015), and Muhammad Ali Gulzar (UCLA PhD 2020) at Virginia Tech. Professor Kim has been active in defining the emerging area of Software Engineering for Data Analytics (SE4DA and SE4ML). Kim’s advising philosophy has been inspired by her PhD adviser, David Notkin–“Focus on the students, since graduating great students means you’ll produce great research, while focusing on the research may or may not produce great students.”