Welcome Faculty Fellows

CDS Faculty Fellows 2023
(left to right) Deepti Ghadiyaram, Najoung Kim, and Archana Venkataraman

The Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) Faculty Fellows Program is conceived to develop and nurture a strong community of exceptional faculty members who pursue novel computational and data-driven research with strong potential for long-term impact. To that end, the program endeavors to identify and support newly recruited faculty members in various disciplines at BU and provide them with opportunities for connecting with the faculty members and programs in CDS.

We are excited to present the 2023-24 cohort of CDS Faculty Fellows.

Deepti Ghadiyaram, Computer Science

Deepti Ghadiyaram will be joining the Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor in July of 2024. She is currently a staff research scientist at Runway, where she focuses on improving quality and safety of generative AI models. Previously, she was a senior research scientist in the Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) group at Meta, focusing on broad topics in computer vision and machine learning. Deepti received her PhD in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017. Her research interests span topics including visual scene understanding, fair and inclusive computer vision, explainability, and perceptual visual quality. She has served her professional community in many ways, including as area chair and program committee member in major machine learning and AI conferences. Discover more about Deepti.

Najoung Kim, Linguistics and Computer Science

Najoung Kim is an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics, an affiliated faculty in the Department of Computer Science at Boston University, and a visiting faculty researcher at Google. Before joining BU, she was a faculty fellow at the Center for Data Science at New York University and received her PhD in cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University. Najoung is interested in studying meaning in both human and machine learners, especially ways in which they generalize to novel inputs and ways in which they treat implicit meaning. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and has received awards at venues such as the Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and *SEM. Discover more about Najoung.

Archana Venkataraman, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Archana Venkataraman is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and an affiliate faculty in the Departments of Biostatistics and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. From 2016-2022, she was an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University. Currently, Archana directs the Neural Systems Analysis (NSA) Laboratory, which works at the intersection of biomedical imaging, artificial intelligence, and clinical neuroscience. Her work has yielded novel insights into neurological disorders such as autism, schizophrenia, and epilepsy, with the long-term goal of improving patient care. Archana has won numerous awards, notably an NSF CAREER and recognition by MIT Technology Review as one of 35 Innovators Under 35. Her research is supported by NSF and the National Institutes of Health. Discover more about Archana.

Please join us in congratulating Professors Ghadiyaram, Kim, and Venkataraman on their appointments as CDS Faculty Fellows. All bring enormous talent and potential through their unique interdisciplinary portfolios to advance BU's computing and data science capabilities, and we are excited for what the future holds for them and their research. We look forward to their contributions in the years ahead.