Faculty & Staff

Professor Benson's research areas include operating systems, parallel computing, and programming languages. He has designed and developed several run-time systems and tools for parallel programming languages and libraries. Specifically, he led the development of USFMPI, a multi-threaded implementation of MPI 1.2 for Linux using either Myrinet or Ethernet. In addition, Professor Benson co-created FlashMob Computing and he implemented much of the software that enabled the harnessing of 700...

David is an assistant professor at the University of San Francisco. His research interests are natural language processing, machine learning, and databases — specifically on the personal and cultural/demographic information transmitted during speech and typing. This research may lead to more accurate speech recognition systems. Prior to joining USF, David was a research assistant in the Speech Lab at Queens College and an instructor at Hunter College. He has previously worked for the City of...

Christopher Brooks is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at USF, with a joint appointment in the Department of Engineering. He joined USF in 2002 after completing a PhD in computer science at the University of Michigan. He also holds an MS in computer science from San Francisco State University, and a BA and JBA in English and journalism, respectively, from the University of Wisconsin. From 2010-2019, Professor Brooks served as associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences...

Maria Daltayanni's research interests include reputation and recommender systems in crowdsourcing environments with specialization in two-sided marketplaces (labor, advertising, games). Her patent pending work in developing predictive analytics infrastructure in advertising data warehouses brings together big data and statistical learning. Her recent research in learning unbiased employee rankings (WorkerRank) has been used in labor marketplaces to improve industrial hiring systems. She teaches...

Sophie’s research interests include data visualization and computer science education. She is a co-founder of the Visualization and Graphics Lab (VGL) and on the steering committee for the Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security (VizSec). She is passionate about supporting diverse learners in the classroom, and integrating one-on-one student/faculty interaction into her courses on software development and data visualization. https://sjengle.cs.usfca.edu

After earning BA and PhD degrees from Yale and Stanford Universities, Professor Johnson worked as a UI designer and implementer, engineer manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard Labs, and Sun Microsystems. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he was chair of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. He has taught at Stanford University, Mills College, and in 2006 and 2013 taught HCI as an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury in New...

Kristin Jones teaches CS 107, CS 112, and CS 345 at USF. She studied Computer Science at Mills College, where she also co-taught a Digital Humanities course in the English Department. Prior to studying computer science, Kristin received a PhD in German intellectual history from Harvard University, where she also taught literature and German language classes. She enjoys drawing upon techniques she learned as a German language teacher in order to improve her teaching of programming language...

EJ Jung is interested in protecting security and privacy in the Internet. Currently, she's working on countermeasures against Phishing, malicious javascript, privacy in healthcare, policy compatibility in grid and cloud computing, and usable security. She is also excited to share her passion in community service with USF members.

Professor Karpenko received her PhD and MS in Computer Science from Brown University, and her BS degree in Applied Mathematics from Moscow State University. Before joining USF, she was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley. Professor Karpenko’s research interests lie in the areas of computer graphics and human-computer interaction. In particular, her thesis focused on sketch-based 3D modeling.

Haden's main research interests include algorithm design and computational complexity, game theory, and programmatic digital marketing driven by big data. Prior to joining USF in 2019, Haden was a research scientist at Moloco, Inc. based in Palo Alto, California.

Matthew Malensek received his PhD in computer science from Colorado State University. His research interests are centered around systems approaches to data science, with a focus on scalable analytics, storage and management of voluminous data streams, and cloud/edge computing. These projects span domains such as atmospheric science, epidemiology, and geographic information systems.

During Phil's career in Silicon Valley, he helped build software and hardware products at Borland, Netscape, Motorola, Apple, and a number of startups. He has served in a variety of software engineering, management, and board roles, in businesses spanning packaged software, web browsers, mobile devices, and Internet services. At USF, Phil teaches courses in the Systems track.

Dr. Pournaghshband is the founder and director of Networks & Security Research Laboratory (Nets Lab). He is committed to promoting a diverse and inclusive learning environment in computer science, and consistently develops pedagogies to incorporate cybersecurity into all computer science courses. Dr. Pournaghshband is the recipient of Fulbright Scholar Award in Austria.

Professor Rollins is a professor of computer science who teaches classes in the areas of software development and distributed computing. For the 2020/2021 academic year she also holds a part-time, visiting position in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University, where she collaborates on research to promote greater diversity and inclusion in computing through supplemental academic support. Professor Rollins recently completed a rotation as a program director in the...

Professor Wolber’s focuses on empowering artists, designers, kids, women, men, humanity majors, business students — makers of all types — to add coding to their creative arsenals. He designed and teaches USF’s core CS course, Computing, Mobile Apps, and the Web, which allows USF students from all majors to learn coding by building mobile apps. Wolber runs the sites DragAndDropCode.com and appinventor.org, and is the author of Drag and Drop Code: Create iPhone and Android Apps with Thunkable,...

Professor Beste F. Yuksel is the founder and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab which has a high proportion of women and underrepresented minority students as well as military veterans. She has received the National Science Foundation CISE Research Infrastructure Award in 2017. Her research has won a Best Paper Award (first author) and a Honorable Mention Award (as lead professor and conceiver of research) at ACM CHI which is the top publication venue in the field of Human-Computer...