CSL welcomes four new faculty members

This semester CSL welcomed four new faculty members in the areas of electrical and computer engineering and computer sciences. Read more about their backgrounds, and what they hope to accomplish at CSL below!

Saurabh Gupta

Gupta is joining the University of Illinois directly from being a research scientist at Facebook AI Research in Pittsburgh. Before this, he received a Ph.D. in computer science from University of California, Berkeley in 2018, and a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi. He is interested in artificial intelligence and wants to understand the interplay between computer vison and robotics. Gupta will be an assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering (ECE), with an affiliate appointment in computer science (CS).

Radhika Mittal

Prior to joining ECE as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Mittal was a post-doc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She received her Ph.D. in computer science from University of California, Berkeley in August 2018 after receiving her bachelors degree in computer science and engineering from IIT, Kharagpur. Mittal is interested in computer systems and networking, with her research primarily focusing on improving performance and manageability of networked systems.

Shaloo Rakheja

Previously an assistant professor at New York University (NYU), Rakheja joins the ECE department as an assistant professor this fall. Prior to her time at NYU, Rakheja was a post-doc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her masters and Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Rakheja’s research aims to connect the physics of nanoscale devices to their applications in energy-efficient computing.

Richard Yi Zhang

Zhang joined the ECE department as an assistant professor at the beginning of the semester after completing a post-doc at the University of California, Berkeley in industrial engineering and operations research. Prior to that he received his Ph.D. from MIT in electrical engineering and computer science. Zhang’s research focuses include safety-critical guarantees for optimization and machine learning, power system optimization, computational design of power magnetics, and numerical algorithms for large-scale semidefinite programs.