The Department of Computing Science is pleased to welcome three new colleagues this Fall: Sarah Nadi, Karim Ali and Or Sheffet. Sarah (PhD University of Waterloo, 2014) and Or (PhD Carnegie Mellon University, 2014) will hold (tenure-track) Assistant Professor positions, and will join the Software Engineering and Machine Learning research groups, respectively. Karim (PhD University of Waterloo, 2014) will hold a Research Assistant Professor Position and will join the Software System group. Below you can find a brief bio for each of them.
We are all very pleased (and excited!) with their hires and would like to offer a warm welcome to all three of them, wishing them an enjoyable and productive career at the University of Alberta.
Sarah Nadi
Sarah Nadi received her PhD from the University of Waterloo in 2014. During the course of her graduate studies, she has received several awards and scholarships, including an NSERC CGS-D. Her doctoral work on detecting variability anomalies in Software Product Lines (SPLs) and on reverse-engineering configuration constraints has been published in top-tier software engineering conferences and journals such as ICSE and TSE. Before joining the University of Alberta, she spent almost two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany where she worked on ways to help application developers avoid misusing (security) APIs. Her work on the topic included incorporating SPL concepts into new domains such as cryptography. Sarah's research interests lie in providing automated support for software development and maintenance, with a particular focus on highly configurable software systems.
Or Sheffet
Or Sheffet is an Assistant Professor at the Computing Science department of the University of Alberta. He completed his PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Avrim Blum. Before joining UofA, he was a visitor at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Ottawa, and prior to that -- a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard's SEAS, under the supervision Prof. Salil Vadhan; and also a Research Fellow at the Theoretical Foundations of Big Data program at Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing. He also has a M.Sc in computer science from the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he was advised by Prof. Oded Goldreich and a B.Sc magna cum laude in math and computer science from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel, where he worked with Prof. Nati Linial as part of Amirim honors program. His general research interests lie in theoretical computer science, machine learning and algorithmic game theory; but in recent years his primary focus has been on data analysis that is guaranteed to preserve privacy by adhering to the mathematically rigorous definition of Differential Privacy.
Karim Ali
Since completing his PhD, Karim Ali has been a postdoctoral researcher at TU Darmstadt, Germany within the Secure Software Engineering group. His main research interest is designing program analyses that are applicable in real-world settings. His work has included developing various techniques for partial-program analysis for object-oriented languages such as Java, designing more precise taint and type state analyses, and improving the usability of security analysis tools.