Upcoming Doctoral Dissertations

"Building reliable and secure software increasingly depends on work that grows faster than the people available to do it: sorting and prioritizing security vulnerability reports, testing machine learning models for hidden failures, and judging the AI assistants that now help write code. Each of these tasks is still done largely by hand. This dissertation demonstrates that natural language processing (NLP) methods can handle much of this manual work. " Read more

"Single-photon light detection and ranging (LiDAR) offers exceptional sensitivity for 3D imaging but faces fundamental barriers: sparse signal photons, high noise, and slow acquisition speeds due to point-by-point scanning. These limitations are especially severe in photon-starved environments or when imaging through scattering media. This dissertation overcomes these challenges through a unified hardware-software framework that co-designs physical data acquisition with computational reconstruction." Read more

"Artificial Intelligence (AI) has rapidly transformed scientific research, industry, and everyday life. The rapid evolution of AI models, particularly large language models (LLMs), has dramatically increased the computational and memory demands of modern AI workloads. As AI models continue to grow in scale and complexity, performance bottlenecks increasingly arise across multiple layers of the AI systems stack" Read more

"Artificial intelligence (AI) has growing potential to support clinical decision-making by detecting health risks, interpreting predictive patterns, and enabling timely personalized interventions. However, many clinical AI systems remain limited by black-box predictions, static explanations, and limited adaptation to users' emotional and cognitive states. These limitations are especially critical in behavioral health, where risk states fluctuate in daily life and effective support requires transparent, emotionally appropriate, and shared understanding between patients and clinicians. " Read more