ICS Welcomes Six New Faculty

UC Irvine’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) welcomes six new senate faculty in 2024-25. With research interests ranging from artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction to software engineering and the intersection of machine learning and statistical methods, our new hires add to core areas of excellence in ICS while strengthening ties with application domains, including business, health and the environment.

Matthew Bietz
Associate Professor of Teaching, Informatics
Ph.D., Information, University of Michigan
Matthew Bietz is a Human-Computer Interaction scholar focusing on the theory and practice of information technology design. He has studied how people share data and collaborate in a variety of scientific fields including oceanography, microbiology, public health and space exploration. He recently was a principal investigator for the NSF-funded Pervasive Data Ethics for Computational Research (PERVADE) project. He has been a lecturer in ICS since 2010 and became an associate professor of teaching in July 2024.

Sven Koenig
Chancellor’s Professor and Bren Chair, Computer Science
Ph.D., Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Sven Koenig is interested in intelligent systems that operate in large, nondeterministic, nonstationary or partially known domains. His research centers around techniques for decision-making that enable agents (such as robots) to act intelligently in real time. In finding solutions, he draws on artificial intelligence, decision theory and operations research. He joined the ICS Faculty in July 2024.

Arkajyoti (Arka) Saha
Assistant Professor, Statistics
Ph.D., Biostatistics, Johns Hopkins University
Arka Saha combines the theory and practice of artificial intelligence and machine learning with statistics. His research focuses on scientific collaborations to combine AI/ML technologies with domain expertise using statistics. He is particularly interested in analyzing the data’s dependence structure. This is of fundamental interest in environmental science, biomedical sciences, finance, data privacy and algorithmic fairness. He joined the ICS Faculty in July 2024.

Wenzhuo Zhou
Assistant Professor, Statistics
Ph.D., Statistics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Wenzhuo Zhou’s research lies in the intersection of machine learning, statistics and artificial intelligence. The primary focus of his work is leveraging statistical and mathematical tools to understand the nature of learning algorithms, aiming to close the theory-practice gap. In particular, he is interested in reinforcement learning, deep representation learning and large language models (LLMs), with applications spanning healthcare, engineering and business fields. He joined the ICS faculty in July 2024.

Wanrong Zhu
Assistant Professor, Statistics
Ph.D., Statistics, University of Chicago
Wanrong Zhu is broadly interested in statistical inference problems, with her research situated at the intersection of statistics, machine learning and stochastic optimization. Her recent work focuses on the theory and methods of uncertainty quantification for machine learning in modern settings, such as those involving Stochastic Gradient Descent or distribution-free inference methods. Additionally, she is interested in goodness-of-fit testing, algorithmic stability, data privacy and adaptive data analysis. She joined the ICS faculty in September 2024.

Thomas Zimmermann
Chancellor’s Professor and Bren Chair, Informatics
Ph.D., Computer Science, Saarland University
Thomas Zimmermann works on cutting-edge research in software engineering, data science, machine learning and digital games. Until recently, he worked as a Sr. Principal Researcher at Microsoft. His mission is to empower software developers and organizations to build better software and services with AI. He is best known for his pioneering work on systematic mining of software repositories and his empirical studies of software development in industry. He will join the ICS faculty in January 2025.