CDS is pleased to welcome four new faculty members to our community. These exceptional faculty, Aldo Pacchiano, Joshua Peterson, Lisa Wobbes, and Xuezhou (Jack) Zhang bring a wide-range of experience to BU with expertise ranging from machine learning to algorithm fairness and data science. Welcome to all.
Aldo Pacchiano comes to BU as a tenure-track assistant professor in CDS. Aldo is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research NYC and obtained his PhD at University of California, Berkeley. His research lies in the areas of reinforcement learning, online learning, bandits, and algorithmic fairness. Aldo is particularly interested in furthering the statistical understanding of learning phenomena in adaptive environments and using these theoretical insights and techniques to design efficient and safe algorithms for scientific, engineering, and large-scale societal applications. Read more.
Joshua Peterson comes to BU as a tenure-track assistant professor in CDS. Before joining BU, Josh was a postdoc in the department of computer science at Princeton University. He completed his PhD in cognition, brain, and behavior in the Department of Psychology at University of California, Berkeley, and also was a member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR). Dr. Peterson's work focuses on the use of large-scale datasets and machine learning to understand and predict human behavior, including decision-making, face perception and stereotyping, moral judgment, and visual object classification. Read more.
Lisa Wobbes comes to BU as a clinical assistant professor at CDS. She received her PhD in applied mathematics from Delft University of Technology. After her PhD, Lisa worked as a data scientist at the Dutch Executive Agency for Education in the Hague. There she gained experience working with classical data-science techniques. Recently, Lisa developed interest in neural networks for image recognition, graph analysis (graph neural networks), and natural language processing.
Prior to joining BU, Lisa worked as a research engineer at a small consulting/engineering company, where she closely collaborated with researchers from Brown, Rice, and Waseda universities. Her work included building cutting-edge simulations for modal analysis and fluid dynamics. Read more.
Xuezhou (Jack) Zhang comes to BU as a tenure-track assistant professor in CDS. Jack is a postdoc in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Center for Statistics and Machine Learning at Princeton University. He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a visiting scholar in the Learning and Games program at Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing in spring 2022. His research covers the theory and applications of interactive machine learning, with a particular focus on robotics and automation. Read more.