Associate Professor

Dr. Leonardo Bobadilla (FIU) is currently an Assistant Professor in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University. He is interested in understanding the information requirements for solving fundamental robotics tasks such as navigation, patrolling, tracking, and motion safety and has deployed test-beds that can track and control a large number of mobile units that require minimal sensing, actuation, and computation. He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has received several awards and has published 37 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers. His research articles have appeared in prestigious journals such as IEEE Journal of Automation Science and Engineering, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks. His research has been sponsored by the Army Research Office, Department of Homeland Security, NSF, and the Ware Foundation. He has graduated three Ph.D. students and one master’s student who are well placed in major companies and universities.

Bogdan Carbunar is an Associate Professor in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at FIU, and directs the Cyber Security and Privacy Research (CaSPR) Lab, where he develops secure and usable systems.  His research interests are at the intersection of security, privacy and distributed systems, where he derives novel insights through the use of machine learning, applied cryptography and user studies. His recent interests include fraud and abuse detection in online systems (e.g., Google, Facebook, Yelp), mobile authentication and cryptocurrency-based censorship resistance. He has published papers in top tier conferences and journals (see link above for details) some of which have received best paper awards. He holds a PhD in computer science from Purdue University and a BS from Politehnica University Bucharest.

Peter J. Clarke received his BSc. degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of the West Indies (Cave Hill) in 1987, MS degree from SUNY Binghamton University in 1996 and PhD in Computer Science from Clemson University in 2003. His research interests are in the areas of software testing, software metrics, model-driven software development, domain-specific modeling languages and computer science education. He has published over 75 research papers and is the PI on several NSF grants. He is a member of: ACM (SIGSOFT, SIGCSE, and SIGAPP); IEEE Computer Society; and the Association for Software Testing (AST).

Dr. Mark A. Finlayson is an Eminent Scholar Chaired Associate Professor of Computer Science in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University (FIU). He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from MIT in 2012 under the supervision of Patrick H. Winston. He also received his M.S. from MIT in 2001 and his B.S. from the University of Michigan in 1998, both in Electrical Engineering. Before joining SCIS he was a Research Scientist in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for 2½ years. His research focuses on representing, extracting, and using higher-order semantic patterns in natural language, especially focusing on narrative. His work intersects artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and cognitive science. He directs the Cognac Laboratory (The Cognition, Language, and Culture lab), whose members focus on investigating the science of narrative from a computational point of view. His research has been funded by the NSF, NIH, DARPA, OSD, ONR, DHS, and IBM. He was the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award in 2018 and an IBM Faculty Award in 2019. He was named Edison Fellow for Artificial Intelligence for 2019-2021 at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). He has received multiple teaching awards at FIU, plus an FIU faculty award for research and creative activities in 2019.

Dr. Christine Lætitia Lisetti is an Associate Professor in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University, and the director of the Affective Social Computing Laboratory (ascl.cs.fiu.edu). She received her Ph.D. in computer science from Florida International University in 1995, and in 1996 she was awarded the Individual Research Award from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to conduct her Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Stanford University, jointly in computer science and psychology. She joined FIU from ENST/Sophia, France where she was a professor, and was previously an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Central Florida.

Dr. Lisetti’s work on affective social computing aims at creating digital and engaging socially intelligent agents that can interact naturally with humans via expressive multi-modalities in a variety of contexts involving socio-emotional content. Her interests involve research on virtual characters for healthcommunication and behavior change. While in Europe, her research was supported by grants from the European Commission (EC), EUREKA Information Technology for European Advancement (ITEA), the Provence-Alpes Cote d’Azur (PACA) Regional R&D Program, and ST Microelectronics. Dr. Lisetti has received funding from Interval Research Corporation, Intel Corporation, Vcom3D, as well as from Federal funding agencies including the Office of Naval Research (ONR), US Army STRICOM, NASA Ames, the National Institute of Health (NIH), and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Christine Lisetti is on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, the first journal in her field of research which launched in 2010. She is the recipient of the 2000 AAAI Nils Nilsson Award, and the author of numerous scientific articles. She has served on various program committees of international conferences, she has co-chaired several international events on affective computing, and has been an invited speaker at international conferences. Dr. Lisetti has served as a research expert for the National Science Foundation (USA), for the “Agence Nationale de la Recherche” (FRANCE), for the “Fonds de Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies” (CANADA), and for the European Commission (BELGIUM).

Dr. Deng Pan received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2007. His research interests are generally in high performance switch design and high speed networking. His current research focuses on network function virtualization, data center networking, and energy efficient networking. He has published over fifty peer-reviewed papers in leading refereed journals and conferences, including the IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE INFOCOM, and IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium. He has served as local arrangement co-chair or technical program committee member in many international conferences, including IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE GLOBECOM, and ICPP.

Dr. Prabakar developed a scheme to access vast amount of spatial data from a semantic database and flyover the data in real-time – this emerged as TerraFly software from High Performance Database Research Center, FIU. He has also designed dynamic mosaicking algorithms for spatial images and integrated vector GIS data with spatial data sets. Towards external funding, eight grant proposals were funded for a total amount of $13.7M with Dr. Prabakar’s role in these proposals as Principal Investigator, Co-Investigator, or Senior Investigator. Currently, Dr. Prabakar is working with a team of his colleagues on a fault-tolerant distributed computing grid with large number of sensors.

See Dr. Prabakar’s CV here.

Masoud Sadjadi received the B.S. degree in Hardware Engineering in 1995, the M.S. degree in Software Engineering in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Michigan State University in 2004. Dr. Sadjadi is currently an Associate Professor in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University, where he has been on the faculty since 2004. He is the Director of the Center of Partnership for International Research & Education (PIRE) funded by the National Science Foundation for $2.3 million. He is also the Director of the Autonomic Cloud Research Laboratory (ACRL) and leads several projects under the Latin American Grid initiative. He has extensive experience in software development and leading large scale software engineering projects both in industry and in academia. Currently, he is collaborating with top researchers in 8 countries and is leading several international collaborative research projects. He is serving as a General Chair of SEKE 2012 and has served as the Program Chair, Co-Chair, and Committee Member of several top-tier international conferences and workshops of his field. He has served as a referee for several IEEE and SP&E journals and as a referee and panelist for several funding agencies including National Science Foundation (NSF), Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), and Florida Sea Grant. His current research interests include Distributed Systems, Software Engineering, Autonomic Computing, High-Performance Computing, Grid Computing, Cloud Computing, Pervasive Systems, and Mobile Computing. He has more than 80 refereed publications and is PI or Co-PI of 17 grants from NSF, IBM, Kaseya, TeraGrid, and FIU for a total of about $6 million. He is a member of the IEEE and can be reached at sadjadi@cs.fiu.edu and http://www.cs.fiu.edu/~sadjadi/.

Fahad Saeed is a tenured Associate Professor in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University (FIU), Miami FL and is the director of Saeed Lab which is a parallel computing and data science group (https://saeedlab.cis.fiu.edu/). His research interests include parallel and distributed algorithms and architectures, computational proteomics, genomics, connectomics and big data problems in computational biology and bioinformatics.

Prior to joining FIU, Prof. Saeed was an Assistant Professor (2014-2018) in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Department of Computer Science at Western Michigan University (WMU), Kalamazoo Michigan. He was tenured and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor at WMU in July 2018. Dr. Saeed was a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then a Research Fellow in the Systems Biology Center at National Institutes of Health (NIH), Bethesda MD from Aug 2010 to January 2014. He received his PhD in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2010.

Dr. Saeed has served as the program co-chair of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BICoB) Conference and IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (IEEE BIBM). He is the founding chair of IEEE Workshop on HPC solutions to Big Data Computational Biology (IEEE HPC-BCB). He also serves on the editorial board of Springer Journal of Network Modeling Analysis in Health Informatics and Bioinformatics since 2014. He has served on numerous IEEE/ACM program committees and is peer-reviewer for more than a dozen journals.

Dr. Saeed is a Senior Member of ACM and also a Senior Member of IEEE. His honors include ThinkSwiss Fellowship (2007, 2008), NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship Award (2010), Fellows Award for Research Excellence (FARE) at NIH (2012), NSF CRII Award (2015), WMU Outstanding New Researcher Award (2016), WMU Distinguished Research and Creative Scholarship Award (2018), and NSF CAREER Award (2017).

Dr. Mo Sha is an Associate Professor in the Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences at Florida International University (FIU). Before joining FIU, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Binghamton University – State University of New York. His research interests include wireless networking, Internet of Things, applied machine learning, network security, and cyber-physical systems. He published more than 50 research papers, served on the technical program committees of 16 premier conferences, and reviewed paper for 21 journals. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2021, the NSF CRII award in 2017, and the Educator of the Year in Computer Science award and the Career Champion award at Binghamton University in 2018. He is a senior member of IEEE, a senior and lifetime member of ACM, and a member of Sigma Xi.

Ning Xie received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2012 from MIT. His research interests are in many aspects of algorithmic and complexity theory, including property testing, local computation algorithms, Fourier analysis of Boolean functions, circuit complexity and coding theory. His research has been supported by NSF and U.S. Air Force Research Lab Summer Faculty Fellowship Program.