November 4, 2024 

BATON ROUGE, LA – Over the course of the last year, the LSU Division of Computer Science (CS) and Engineering has bolstered its faculty ranks with nearly a dozen talented academics and researchers with a wide breadth of expertise. It’s a development indicative of a rapidly-growing major in the College of Engineering and a priority area for the university as a whole.

“The Division of Computer Science and Engineering is thriving, embodying the ‘We Build Teams That Win’ motto,” said Ibrahim “Abe” Baggili, professor and chair of the division. “We are committed to recruiting world-class faculty to advance the Scholarship First Agenda, driving growth that enriches our talented and ever-expanding community of computer science students.”

Joining the CS division are:

• Aakash Bansal – Bansal hails from New Delhi, India, and, prior to joining LSU, earned his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, working with Professor Collin McMillan. His research interests lie at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI), software engineering, and human-computer interaction. The overarching goal of his work is to integrate human intelligence with emerging AI technologies to help developers improve their workflow and the robustness of their developments. His short-term research focuses include automation of code summarization for legacy code, software security, and software testing.
• Elias Bou-Harb – Bou-Harb’s expertise includes operational cyber/network security, empirically-driven systems’ forensics, data analytics for cybersecurity, and learning methods for anomaly detection and advanced persistent threats. He serves on numerous prestigious international scientific advisory boards, including NATO's Allied Command Transformation (ACT), the University of Tokyo, and Masaryk University (in Czech Republic). He is also the editor of three notable Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions and serves on more than 10 U.S. and international research and adjudication committees. Previously, Bou-Harb acted as the director of the Cyber Center for Security and Analytics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where he forged and managed large-scale cybersecurity research collaboration efforts. Prior to that, he was a senior research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he contributed to federally-funded projects related to cyber threat intelligence and worked closely with the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) related to critical infrastructure resiliency. He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), an IEEE senior member, and is the recipient of seven best research paper awards.
• Tasnuva Farheen – Farheen is jointly appointed with LSU’s Center for Computation & Technology (CCT). She earned her Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Florida in Summer 2024 and her bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET) in 2018. Additionally, she did an internship at NVIDIA. Her research interest includes hardware security and reliability, applications of AI, Quantum secure communication, and green computing.
• Umar Farooq – Before joining LSU in Fall 2023, Farooq was a software engineer at ByteDance/TikTok Inc., focusing on compiler infrastructure. He earned his Ph.D. in 2021 from the University of California, Riverside (UCR). His research focuses on programming systems, particularly for mobile apps, and involves developing runtime systems, program analysis, and tools to automatically detect, prevent, and fix reliability and efficiency issues in software. He has a keen interest in leveraging the synergy between software engineering and emerging techniques, including large language models (LLMs) and Generative AI, to address challenges in both research areas. His work has been recognized with a Best Paper Runner-up Award at MobiSys 2018 and the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGMOBILE Research Highlights in 2018.
• Felipe Fronchetti – Fronchetti is currently working on the intersection between software engineering (SE) and human-robot interaction (HRI), and his research focuses on developing programming technologies to support end-users in robotics and newcomers in open-source communities. Among his projects, there are studies investigating the integration of newcomers in open-source communities, the benefits of social coding platforms for open-source development, and the development of end-user technologies for industrial and collaborative robots. With more than 10 years of experience in research, Fronchetti’s studies have resulted in papers published in top-tier journals and conferences in software engineering, including research venues such as the International Conference in Software Engineering (ICSE) and the Transactions in Software Engineering Journal (TSE). Fronchetti also holds a master's degree in computer science from the University of São Paulo, ranked the best university in Latin America according to U.S. News & World Report (2024).
• James Ghawaly – Ghawaly’s research focuses on modern and emerging machine-learning techniques, with applications to national security, specifically cybersecurity. He also holds joint appointments with LSU CCT and the LSU Office of Academic Affairs (OAA). Prior to LSU, he was a staff research data scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he led research efforts to develop applied deep learning and neuromorphic computing approaches for federal sponsors. Recently, Ghawaly’s work has been centered around transformer technology and LLM research. This focus includes implementing these models in security-related applications, as well as investigating the security and potential vulnerabilities within LLM systems themselves. At LSU, he teaches a course on LLMs for undergraduate upperclassman and is developing a graduate-level deep-learning course focusing on transformers and other emerging deep-learning architectures.
• Mahmood Jasim – Jasim earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2023. He conducts interdisciplinary research across human-computer interactions (HCI), information visualization, applied machine learning, and social computing to address complex socio-technical problems. His research expertise includes designing, developing, and evaluating decision-support systems for inclusive collection and analysis of large-scale public-generated data to enable effective and efficient data-driven decision-making. He is the recipient of several best paper awards including CSCW 2020, DIS 2021 (Honorable Mention), and EuroVIS 2022. 
• Hartmut Kaiser – Kaiser is probably best known for his involvement in open-source software projects, such as being the author of several C++ libraries he has contributed to boost.org that are in use by thousands of developers worldwide. In his current research, he focuses on leading the STE||AR Group at LSU CCT, working on the practical design and implementation of future execution models and programming methods using the HPX runtime system – a modern C++ library for concurrency and parallelism. His research interests are focused on the complex interaction of compiler technologies, runtime systems, active libraries, and modern system’s architectures. His goal is to enable the creation of a new generation of scientific applications in powerful, though complex, environments, such as high-performance computing, distributed and cloud computing, spatial information systems, and compiler technologies.
• David Shepherd – Shepherd earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science at the University of Delaware and his B.S. in Computer Science at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, built sweat equity as employee No. 9 at Tasktop Technologies, risen to senior principal scientist at ABB Corporate Research, and received four grants in four years as an associate professor at VCU. His research has produced tools that have been used by thousands, innovations that have been featured in the popular press, and practical ideas that have won business plan competitions. Shepherd currently serves as the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Systems & Software. His current work focuses on using virtual reality to treat ADHD and end-user programming for robotics.
• Phani Vadrevu –Prior to LSU, Vadrevu worked as an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans (UNO). His research interests span all areas of Internet security and privacy. Recently, he has been focused on developing techniques to measure and mitigate social engineering attacks; such as Internet phishing, phone scams, malvertisements, etc.; as well as web-based bot attacks. In his research, he sometimes infiltrates cybercriminal groups and reverse engineers their software to gain defensive insights. Vadrevu is also very interested in studying Internet security problems from HCI and social computing perspectives.
• Xugui Zhou – Zhou obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Virginia. Before joining UVA in 2019, he was a senior engineer at NR Research Institute, State Grid of China. His research interests are at the intersection of computer system security and control system engineering by drawing techniques from formal methods and machine learning. His work has appeared at top-tier venues, including AAAI, DSN, and IEEE TDSC. Zhou has received the Rising Star Award at CPS 2023, the Carlos and Esther Farrar Graduate Fellowship Award, the Google Ph.D. Fellowship Internal Selection, the and Georgia Tech Research Institute Focus Fellowship Award. He is also the inventor of three international patents.

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Contact: Joshua Duplechain
Director of Communications
225-578-5706
josh@lsu.edu