Department of Computer Science Welcomes Three New Tenure-Track Faculty Members

Three new tenure-track faculty members are joining the Department of Computer Science (CS) in the Fall 2020 semester. Yifan Sun, Stanley Bak and  Shubham Jain are all new to Stony Brook University.

Yifan Sun’s research interest is in optimizations for machine learning. She recently completed two postdocs, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and L’Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA) in Paris, France. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2015, with research focusing on convex optimization and semidefinite programming. She then worked at Technicolor Research and Innovation, focusing on machine learning and data science applications.

Stanley Bak investigates formal verification methods for neural networks, cyber-physical systems and hybrid automata. He received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2007, his Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 2009 and his PhD from the Department of Computer Science at UIUC in 2013. From 2013 to 2018, Bak was a Research Computer Scientist at the US Air Force Research Lab (AFRL), both in the Information Directorate in Rome, NY, and in the Aerospace Systems Directorate in Dayton, OH. He also helped run Safe Sky Analytics, a research consulting company investigating verification and autonomous systems for the Air Force and FAA, and taught at Georgetown University.

Shubham Jain's research focuses on smart environments, wearable health sensing frameworks, movement mechanics and cyber-physical systems (CPS). She received her MS and PhD from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University in 2017, where she was a member of WINLAB. Jain's expertise lies in leveraging pervasive sensing devices toward developing multimodal data integration and interpretation frameworks. Her research on pedestrian safety has been featured in various media outlets including the Wall Street Journal. Prior to joining Stony Brook, she was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Old Dominion University.

"We are excited to welcome Yifan, Stanley and Shubham to our Computer Science family and look forward to working with them in the department," said Computer Science Chair Samir Das.