New Computer Science faculty members Tasos Kyrillidis and Ang Chen.
Two New CS Faculty Members
Luah Nakhleh, Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Rice University, is happy to announce the hiring of two new assistant professors. He said, “We are very excited to hire two very strong junior faculty members who also happen to be “Rice descendants”—Tasos’ Ph.D. adviser was a research scientist at Rice’s ECE department and Ang’s Ph.D. adviser received his Ph.D. from our department. Hiring both of them does not only add strength to our department, but also puts us on the path to a more successful faculty hiring and future growth of the department.”
Ang Chen, assistant professor of computer science (CS), earned a B.Eng. in information security from Wuhan University, China, in 2009, and a Ph.D. in computer and information science from the University of Pennsylvania in July 2017. His research focuses on distributed systems, networking and security, with an emphasis on improved reliability and security.
Chen's recent interests have led him to work on secure forensics with network provenance, defenses against distributed denial-of-service attacks, and programmable networks. He was encouraged to consider a faculty position at Rice by his Ph.D. adviser at the University of Pennsylvania, Andreas Haeberlen. Haeberlen is a Rice CS Ph.D. alumnus and the Raj and Neera Singh Assistant Professor for computer and information science at UPenn.
Anastasios “Tasos” Kyrillidis, assistant professor of CS, earned his Ph.D. in computer and communication sciences from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2014. He received a five-year diploma and master’s degree in electronic and computer engineering from the Technical University of Crete in 2008 and 2010, respectively. Kyrillidis' CS Ph.D. adviser, Volkan Cevher, worked as a Rice Research Scientist prior to joining EPFL.
Since 2014, Kyrillidis has been a Simons Foundation postdoctoral researcher with the Wireless Networking and Communication Group at the University of Texas at Austin. He will join the Rice faculty on July 1, 2018, after he completes his term as a Goldstine Fellow at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in New York. Kyrillidis was hired as part of the university-wide initiative to increase data-driven knowledge. The Data Science Initiative is part of the university’s $150 million investment in research excellence.