ICS welcomes four new faculty members for fall 2016 quarter

The UC Irvine Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences hired four new faculty members who started in the fall 2016 quarter. All of them are recognized leaders in their communities and will help ICS maintain its strength in a broad array of information and computer science domains. Please help us welcome these talented researchers:

Rebecca Black
Associate Professor of Informatics
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, Madison
Rebecca Black’s research centers on the literacy and socialization practices of young people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds who are writing and participating in online popular culture-inspired environments. This work includes an explicit focus on the 21st century skills and forms of literacy and learning that youth are engaging with in online spaces. Her 2008 book, Adolescents and Online Fan Fiction, explored how English language-learning youth represent their cultural and linguistic identities through fan fiction texts. Black joins ICS after serving on the faculty at UCI’s School of Education.

Michele Guindani
Associate Professor of Statistics
Ph.D., Università Bocconi (Milan, Italy)
Michele Guindani’s research interests include the use of a Bayesian (parametric and nonparametric) modeling framework for the analysis of problems in biostatistics, genetics, and spatial statistics, and the solution of inverse problems (with particular regard to pharmacokinetics/pharmacodynamics modeling). He is additionally interested in developing statistical models for data integration as well as Bayesian decision-theoretical approaches to address multiple comparison problems in hypothesis testing. Guindani joins UCI after serving as a faculty member at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Sameer Singh
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Sameer Singh’s current research is on large- scale and interactive machine learning applied to information extraction and natural language processing. As a Ph.D. candidate, he had the opportunity to intern at Microsoft Research, Google Research and Yahoo! Labs. Singh also was selected as a DARPA Riser, won the grand prize in the Yelp Dataset Challenge, has been awarded a Yahoo! Key Scientific Challenges Award and was a finalist for the Facebook Ph.D. Fellowship. Singh joins the ICS faculty after serving as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington.

Aaron Trammell
Assistant Professor of Informatics
Ph.D., Rutgers University
Aaron Trammell was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar for Faculty Diversity in Informatics and Digital Knowledge at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California before coming to ICS. His research is focused on revealing historical connections between games, play and the U.S. military-industrial complex. Trammell is also interested in how military ideologies become integrated into game design and how these perspectives are negotiated within the imaginations of players.