Faculty

Martine Ceberio

Assistant Professor

Martine Ceberio received her PhD in Computer Science in June 2003 from the University of Nantes, France. She joined UTEP in August 2003 as a visiting assistant professor, and as a tenure-track assistant professor in August 2004. Her areas of interest are centered around numerical constraint solving, and include (but are not limited to) interval arithmetic, global optimization, soft constraints, and their applications to real-life problems.

Yoonsik Cheon

Associate Professor
Undergraduate Director

Professor Dr. Cheon earned his BS from Korea University, and his masters and doctoral degrees from Iowa State University. He spent eight years on the research staff of the Computer and Software Technology Laboratory at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Taejon, Korea. His research interests are in object-oriented formal methods, including specification languages, specification and verification techniques, and tool support; and in object-oriented programming, including programming language aspects, formal semantics, and programming methodology. He is heavily involved in the Java Modeling Language Project

Eric Freudenthal

Associate Professor

Professor Freudenthal joined the faculty of the University of Texas in El Paso in 2004. Before joining UTEP, he was an Associate Research Scientist in the Computer Science Department of New York University's Courant Institute, where he earned his Ph.D. His contributions to computer science include efficient techniques for implementing secure distributed systems, for coordinating parallel and distributed computations, and for recognizing objects in radar imagery. His present research focus is in strengthening mathematics, engineering, and science education through the integration of programmed computation in freshman-level courses.

Olac Fuentes

Associate Professor

Professor Fuentes' main research area is machine learning in science, in particular, the development of systems that can help scientists extract knowledge and insight from the large amounts of scientific data currently available. His is particularly interested in issues such as the use of unlabeled data, active learning, intelligent optimization feature selection and creation, noise-insensitive and noise-aware algorithms, and the use of prior knowledge. He has worked in applications in astronomy, optics, geology and biology.

   Dr. Fuentes received the B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from the Instituto Tecnologico de Chihuahua, in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1989, the M.S. degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas at El Paso, in 1991, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Rochester, in 1997. From 1998 to 2005 he was a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the Instituto National de Astrofisica, Optica y Electronica.

   Dr. Fuentes was a co-organizer of the First Iberoamerican Workshop on Machine Learning for Scientific Data Analysis, held in conjunction with IBERAMIA 2004 in Puebla, November 22, 2004.

Ann Q. Gates

Professor

Associate VP of Research

Ann Quiroz Gates is Professor of Computer Science and Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her areas of expertise are software property elicitation and specification, and workflow-driven ontologies.

   Professor Gates directs the NSF-funded Cyber-ShARE Center, which focuses on developing and sharing resources through cyber-infrastructure to advance research and education in science. She is a member of the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure, and she serves on the Board of Governors of IEEE-Computer Society. Gates leads the Computing Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI), an NSF-funded consortium that is focused on the recruitment, retention, and advancement of Hispanics in computing. She was also a founding member of the Academic Alliance for the National Center for Women in Information Technology, a national network to advance participation of women in IT. She received the university's 2003 Chancellor's Council Award for Outstanding Teaching and she was named to the Hispanic Business magazine's 2006 100 Influential Hispanics list for her work on the Affinity Research Group model, a comprehensive model for the creation and maintenance of dynamic, productive, and inclusive research groups.

Christopher Kiekintveld

Assistant Professor

Christopher Kiekintveld works in the field of artificial intelligence, focusing on multi-agent systems and strategic reasoning. His Ph.D. is from the University of Michigan (2008), and he comes to UTEP after a post-doc at the University of Southern California.

Vladik Kreinovich

Professor

Vladik Kreinovich received his M.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from St. Petersburg University, Russia, in 1974, and Ph.D. from the Institute of Mathematics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, in 1979. In 1975-80, he worked with the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and in particular, from 1978 with the Special Astrophysical Observatory on the representation and processing of uncertainty in radioastronomy. In 1982-89, he worked on error estimation and intelligent information processing for the National Institute for Electrical Measuring Instruments, Russia. In 1989, he was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. Since 1990, he has been with the Department of Computer Science, University of Texas at El Paso. He has also served as an invited professor in Paris (University of Paris VI), Hong Kong, St. Petersburg, and Brazil.

   Dr. Kreinovich's main interests are the representation and processing of uncertainty, especially interval computations and intelligent control. He has published 3 books, 6 edited volumes, and more than 700 papers. He is a member of the editorial board of the international journal   "Reliable Computing" (formerly, "Interval Computations"), and several other journals. He is co-maintainer of the international website on interval computations: http://www.cs.utep.edu/interval-comp.

   Dr. Kreinovich's honors include: Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Metrological Sciences; recipient of the 2003 El Paso Energy Foundation Faculty Achievement Award for Research awarded by the University of Texas at El Paso, and co-recipient of the 2005 Star Award from the University of Texas System.

Luc Longpré

Associate Professor

Graduate Advisor

Professor Longpre earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Cornell in 1986. Before coming to UTEP he taught at Northeastern University and the University of Washington, and he has also taught classes as a visitor at the University of Montreal.

   His research includes the recasting the study of information theory in a resource bounded framework, and in general, any application of information theory to computer science. He is also trying to link the existence of secure cryptographic systems to structural complexity. Modeling and guaranteeing privacy is another area of interest.

   He has long served as an organizer of the IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity, and he is the Director of UTEP's Center for Information Assurance.

David G. Novick

Southwestern Bell Professor

David G. Novick, AT&T Distinguished Professor in Engineering earned his J.D.at Harvard University in 1977 and his Ph.D. in Computer and InformationScience at the University of Oregon in 1988.Before coming to UTEP he was on the faculty of the Department of ComputerScience and Engineering at the Oregon Graduate Institute and then Directorof Research at the European Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Engineering.

   At UTEP he has served in a number of positions including as Chair of theDepartment of Computer Science and Associate Provost.His research focuses on interactive systems, and especially developmentmethods for interfaces and their documentation. Related interests includetechnologically mediated communication and computational models of dialogue.He served as General Co-chair of the ACM Conference on Universal Usability2000, Program Chair of ACM SIG-DOC 2003, General Chair of ACM SIGDOC 2007,and organized SIGCHI's series of events in Natural Language Interfaces.

Paulo Pinheiro da Silva

Assistant Professor

Paulo Pinheiro da Silva is an Assistant Professor of ComputerScience at the University of Texas at El Paso. He received bothhis bachelors in mathematics and his M.Sc. in computerscience from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, andhis Ph.D. in computer science from Manchester University,UK. Prior to joining UTEP, he spent three and a half years atStanford University as a postdoctoral fellow in the KnowledgeSystems Laboratory, Department of Computer Science.

   Dr. Pinheiro also has over 15 years of experience as an IT consultantworking for public and private companies in Brazil, participating in the design,development, test, deployment and maintenance of numerous mission-critical systems. His industrial experience led him to develop the UMLi languagefor modeling interactive systems.

   Dr. Pinheiro's current research focuses on developing principles, methods, andinfrastructure to enable explainable and trustable systems.Currently he is a co-leader of the Inference Web (IW)project, a collaborative effort between Stanford University andUTEP. IW aims to provide an infrastructure for explaining andtrusting answers from heterogeneous Semantic Web agents andservices. The infrastructure includes tools, services, andlanguage specifications for storing, exchanging, combining,annotating, abstracting, summarizing, comparing and renderinganswer justifications and justification-related metadata providedby reasoners, query answering systems, and web users. IW is being used as an infrastructure for explanationsin a number of DARPA and ARDA projects.

Steve Roach

Associate Professor

Steve Roach graduated from the University of Wyoming in 1997. He was a member of the Automated Software Engineering group at NASA Ames where he worked on the deductive synthesis system, Amphion. He has experience in automated theorem proving, synthesis and integration of decision procedures in theorem provers. He has worked for a variety of chemical engineering firms developing data acquisition and process control systems and process modeling software. He is a principal author of a scientific opportunity visualization program for the Cassini mission to Saturn. He joined the faculty at the University of Texas at El Paso in 2001.

Eunice Santos

Professor

IDS Director

Dr. Eunice E. Santos works in the areas of large-scale distributed processing, computational modeling, complex adaptive systems, and human modeling with applications to the biological, physical, and social sciences. She joined the University of Texas at El Paso in 2009 as Chair and Professor of the Department of Computer Science after serving as a Senior Research Fellow at the US Department of Defense's Center for Technology and National Security Policy. She is also the Director of the National Center for Border Security and Immigration (a DHS Center of Excellence) and the Director of the Center for Defense Systems Research (both also since 2009).

   Dr. Santos was a professor at Virginia Tech and Lehigh University. She earned her PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Santos has received numerous awards, including a National Science Foundation Career Award, the IEEE-CS Technical Achievement Award, the Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Robinson Faculty Award. She is a past member of the IDA/DARPA Defense Science Study Group, and a member of several DoD senior technical advisory committees. She has served as a member of the Research & Technology Organisation Task Group on Psycho-Social Models and Methods in NATO's Effects-Based Approach to Operations Programs.

Pat Teller

Professor

Patricia J. Teller is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), where she has been a faculty member since 1997. She received her bachelor's degree, Masters degree, and Ph.D. (1992) in computer science from New York University; her Ph.D. advisors were Drs. Allan Gottlieb and Ralph Grishman. While working on her dissertation, where she was a visiting scientist at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.

   Dr. Teller's research interests include dynamic adaptation of applications, operating systems, runtime systems, and computer architectures; performance evaluation, modeling, and enhancements; workload characterization; parallel and distributed computing; and computer architecture, emerging technologies, and operating systems. Over the past 16 years, with students and colleagues, she has published over 85 papers and been awarded over $6.6M of research funds from ARL, DARPA, DoD, DoE, NASA, NSF, IBM, and Intel. Her service to the HPC community includes serving as general chair of the 21st International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC08), with almost 10,000 attendees.

   At UTEP she has worked towards the establishment of High Performance Computing infrastructure (with approximately $2M in awards) and worked towards the education, retention, and advancement of students, particularly those from underrepresented populations (with approximately $2.5M in awards). For teaching excellence she was named a CETaL (Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning) Fellow, and she has involved many undergraduate and graduate students in research, including some now working at Google, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Intel Corporation, Microsoft, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center.

Nigel Ward

Professor

Chair

Nigel Ward earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley in 1991 for work on improving the quality of Japanese-English machine translation. His bachelors degree is from the University of Michigan. Before joining UTEP he served for 10 years on the Engineering faculty at the University of Tokyo, becoming the first non-Japanese to receive tenure in over 100 years. At Tokyo he was co-director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory.

   His primary research area is real-time responsiveness in spoken dialog systems. Building from empirical studies of human communication practices, including such subtleties as the uses of uh-huh and um, he is developing ways to make interactions with spoken dialog systems less error prone, less cognitively demanding, more efficient, and more satisfying for users. He and his students are also prototyping other new forms of human-computer interaction. At UTEP he co-directs the Interactive Systems Group.

Sarala Arunagiri

Research Assistant Professor

John Korah

Research Assistant Professor

John Korah received his bachelor degree in Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering from the Government College of Technology, Coimbatore, India and his Masters degree in Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. in Computer Science (2010), from Virginia Tech. He is currently a Research Assistant Professor. His research interests focus on parallel/distributed computing, parallel numerical algorithms, large scale network modeling/simulation, computational social science and information retrieval. He has served as a reviewer for the Journal of Supercomputing and IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics: Part B.