Two Junior Faculty Become Associate Professors

Two junior faculty in the Computer Science Department, Lingqi Yan and Trinabh Gupta, have been promoted from the position of assistant professor to that of associate professor.

Yan, who earned his PhD at UC Berkeley, works in the area of computer graphics, and his research is aimed mainly at building theoretical foundations used to render ultra-realistic images reflecting real-world complexity. He has led the way in exploiting machine-learning approaches for such physically based rendering.

He says that, as a computer graphics researcher, his dream is to “present people with an interactive computer-generated world to live in, just as is done in such movies as The Matrix and Ready Player One.”

Gupta, who received his PhD in computer science from the University of Texas, Austin, came to UCSB in fall 2018, bringing industry experience gained during a year spent as a postdoctoral researcher in the Systems Security and Privacy research group at Microsoft Research.

Pursuing research in the area of computer systems, Gupta says that he especially enjoys taking theoretical constructs from the literature on cryptography (e.g., private information retrieval and homomorphic encryption) and applying them to build systems that provide strong security and user privacy.