The School of Computer Science Welcomes Four New Faculty Members

Jan. 29, 2020

Four faculty members have recently joined the School of Computer Science, including three professors jointly appointed with other departments, and a full-time faculty lecturer in the School. Their profiles are below. Welcome to SOCS!

Christophe Dubach is an associate professor jointly appointed in the Department of Electrical and Computer (ECE) and the School of Computer Science (CS) at McGill University (starting January 2020). Prior to that, he was a reader (associate professor) at the University of Edinburgh.

His research interests include data-parallel language design and implementation, high-level code generation and optimisation for parallel hardware (e.g. GPU, FPGAs), architecture design space exploration, and the use of machine-learning techniques applied to all these topics.

Hsiu-Chin Lin's interests involve research in the fields of robotics and machine learning for motor control. She is interested in enabling robots to assist humans in our everyday activities. Her research centers on model-based motion control, optimization, and learning of robot motion, particularly for robot arms and quadruped robots. Prior to joining McGill University, she was a research associate in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, and a research fellow at the School of Computer Science, University of Birmingham. She received her PhD degree in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh and her MSc degree in Computing Science from the University of Alberta.

Siva Reddy is joining as a joint faculty member in the School of Computer Science and the Department of Linguistics. He is a Facebook CIFAR AI Chair at MILA (Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute). Prior to this, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and a PhD at the University of Edinburgh (funded by Google PhD Fellowship 2015).

Siva's research aims to enable machines with natural language understanding abilities such that conversing with machines feels as natural as conversing with humans. Along this process, he hopes to discover fundamental representations of language, both symbolic and distributional, that allow us to study the connections between language and meaning. His expertise includes building symbolic and deep learning models for language understanding. In his spare time, he enjoys playing badminton or being in nature.

Joseph D'Silva is currently finishing up his Ph.D. at McGill and joining as a faculty lecturer in the School of Computer Science. His research is focused on the design and implementation of database-centric data science and machine learning frameworks that enable data scientists to explore data sets and develop solutions without having to take the data out of the database into specialized software systems. Prior to returning to academia, he has had a decade of industry experience working on distributed database implementations of various Fortune 500 companies.