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...

Chris is always happy to talk about the work that Community Connections does in providing technology access to the poor and underserved, both in San Francisco and in Peru. Dave Wolber and Chris also have a collection of projects related to providing greater transparency in and access to politics, including opencampaigns.com, which allows citizens to track the influence of campaign financing, and the California Budget Simulator, which allows students and citizens to better understand the CA...

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

Patricia teaches bioinformatics, clinical decision support and other courses in the health informatics program and the computer science department. She’s primarily interested in working with students to apply data analytics to the health domain, with the goal of producing software tools that perform analyses for clinicians, researchers, and the public. Collaborating with her students is a big priority for Patricia; a number of them are co-authors of her peer-reviewed articles, and their work...

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, in which students are introduced to computer programming and the web by building apps with App Inventor. Kristin 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...

Alark Joshi works on data visualization projects for improved neurosurgical planning and treatment. His research focuses on developing and evaluating the ability of novel visualization techniques to communicate information for effective decision making and discovery. His work has led to novel visualization techniques in fields as diverse as computational fluid dynamics, atmospheric physics, medical imaging and cell biology. Alark received his PhD from the University of Maryland, was a...

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.

Professor Pournaghshband's research areas include computer networks, computer security, and computer science education.

Sami's general research interests include networking and distributed systems and her current research focuses on data and energy management for mobile systems. Her teaching interests include networking and distributed systems, introductory computer science, data structures, and algorithms. She is also extremely committed to increasing the participation of women in the field of computer science.

Professor Wolber runs USF’s Democratize Computing Lab and focuses on empowering artists, designers, kids, women, men, humanity majors, business students — makers of all types — to add coding to their creative arsenals. He is a leader in teaching beginners to learn coding by programming phones and tablets using the visual language App Inventor. His appinventor.org site has helped over 1.5 million new app creators, and his course-in-a-box materials have served as a template for numerous App...

Beste Filiz Yuksel received her PhD in Computer Science from Tufts University, Boston, working with Robert Jacob. Her research was on the next generation of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that detect and evaluate real-time brain signals using machine learning classification of functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to build adaptable user interfaces for the general population. Her work won a Best Paper Award at ACM CHI 2016. She has also worked with Mary Czerwinski at Microsoft...