Computer Science

Faculty

Mamoun Samaha, PhD - Department Chair

Research Interests

Mobility
Cybersecurity
Artificial intelligence

Education

PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering, ITU, San Jose – California
Masters in Electronics, Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands
BS EE, University of Jordan

About Mamoun

Mamoun Abu-Samaha has extensive industrial experience. He worked for Hewlett Packard as an architect and technology strategist in corporate IT, a software architect, and then a wireless and mobility chief technology officer. Later, he worked for Motorola Mobility as their enterprise CTO. Currently he is co-founder, CEO, and chief strategy officer for MobiWee Inc.

Abu-Samaha’s areas of interest include mobile platforms and services, applications, Android, iOS, IoT, embedded systems, cybersecurity and ethical hacking, blockchain, enterprise architecture, game design, unity, artificial intelligence, machine learning, GAN, and virtual and augmented reality. www.linkedin.com/in/Mobility

Where did you grow up?

I was born in Palestine, lived in Jordan, worked in Dubai, and did my higher education in San Jose, California, and Eindhoven, The Netherlands. I played for the national volleyball team of Jordan and the student teams in Eindhoven.

What are the specifics of your educational background?

With a PhD at ITU, I had a focus on AI & GAN. I try to play volleyball every Sunday in Santa Cruz, my favorite city in California. I love to work with Phil McKinney, CEO of CableLabs, as the key to the future is to always be connected.

What are your research interests?

My research focus is in mobility, mobile devices security, game design and application, blockchain, mobile applications development, capstone projects, AI focus on GAN Software, device form factors and the user experience, and how security will continue to evolve and overlap.

Most of my work is software development in telecommunications and electronics.

What courses/subjects do you teach?

Mobile applications development
Cybersecurity countermeasures, web security & ethical hacking
Software engineering, computer science, algorithms, and blockchain
Game design and software development
AI, Python, C language

What do you enjoy most or find most rewarding about what you teach? Is there anything notable or unique about the kind of students that you teach?

I love to teach and work with students. I learn a lot from students and always give them a chance to teach about something they like, spend one-on-one time to learn, and share their learning in class. I love students who take risks in projects, as 10 percent good work on a new idea is better than 100 percent perfect on a project you are already proficient in. I reward students on progress and trying new things.

What are the specifics of your industry experience?

My industry experience includes serving as director of the Institute of Cybersecurity, CTO of Motorola Mobility/Google, and wireless and mobility CTO for Hewlett Packard.

Qamar Asghar, MS - Adjunct Faculty

15 years’ experience in developing curriculum and teaching professionals in the area of quality and reliability. Over 20 years of experience in leading Quality Programs in high tech. Six Sigma coaching, mentoring, and deployment (DFSS, DMAIC), process/product characterization, optimization, statistical modeling, data mining, data automation, and process control experience in high-tech.

He received MS Mechanical Engineering, University of Tennessee, TN

Mar Castro, MS - Adjunct Faculty

Develops, modifies, and manages automated databases. Plans, develops specifications, and completes and administers reporting and analysis projects. Establishes tracking systems to monitor and display critical steps for all major program enhancement projects. Acts as SME to inquiries and data requests. Receives, performs quality control, and publishes data for use within within PSA, DMDC, and other agencies.

He received MS Software Engineering, Cal State Fullerton, CA

Tushar Chandra - Adjunct Faculty

Lead quality engineer for Software Enablement Team (SET) contributing to various software projects. Responsibilities include using quality engineering techniques to make sure the projects are released with high quality to the customers.

He received MSCS & Engineering, Arizona State University

Patricia Hoffman, PhD - Adjunct Faculty

Patricia Hoffman, PhD is a consultant concentrating in Machine Learning and Data Mining Technologies. She has over 25 years in Modeling and Simulation. Her software development experience ranges from modeling stochastic partial differential equations to image processing. She has taught a wide variety of Mathematics courses at the University of California Santa Cruz in Santa Cruz and has also taught Machine Learning and Data Mining courses at the University of California Santa Cruz – Silicon Valley Campus.

She was the Association of Computing Machinery Chair of the Data Mining Special Interest Group for the San Francisco Bay Area for five years organizing monthly lectures and five Data Mining conferences with over 350 participants.

Publications

Machine Learning in Action Published by Manning – technical editor
Scala for Machine Learning, published by Packt – technical editor
A unified view on the rotational symmetry of equilibria of nematic polymers, dipolar nematic polymers and polymers in higher dimensional space, Communications in Mathematical Sciences 6, 949-974
A Distributed Architecture for the C3 I (Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence) Collection Management Expert System, joint with Allen Rude, AIC Lockheed
Book Review of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, ACM/SIGCHI Bulletin, Volume 21, Issue 2, Pages 125-128 ISSN:0736-6906, 1989

Dongming Liang, PhD - Adjunct Faculty

20+ years of programming for complex enterprise software design and implementation. Extensive experiences on database internals. Solid understanding and enthusiastic on new technologies with Cloud Computing services (PaaS/IaaS), Big Data with Hadoop ecosystem and Analytics platform. Strong background in relational databases query processing research and development.

He received PhD Computer Science, York University, Canada

Richard Riehle, PhD - Adjunct Faculty

Dr. Richard D. Riehle is a professor at ITU and a visiting professor at Naval Postgraduate School. He has been creating and managing software activities since the early 1960’s. His software engineering experience spans both military and civilian applications. In the military realm, he has been an active participant on some projects (command and control, etc.), and a shirt-sleeves consultant on others. Civilian software experience spans the full range of commercial enterprises: hospital information systems, banking, insurance, wholesale distribution, and medical billing, to name a few. Beginning in the late 1980’s, Dr. Riehle’s focus turned to software consulting and training. As a trainer, he conducted courses of his own design in Ada, C++, software methods, and object-oriented development.

He received a Bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University and a MSSE from National University. He also earned a doctorate in software Engineering from Naval Postgraduate School.

Cornel Pokorny, PhD - Emeritus Professor

Dr. Pokorny received his Doctorate in Computer Science from Technical University in Vienna, Austria. His research areas are: computer graphics, object oriented design and web programming. Dr. Pokorny’s interests include computer graphics, photorealistic rendering, graphical user interfaces, abstract algebra and cryptography.

Dr. Pokorny is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at California Polytechnic State University, and is now Department Chair at International Technological University.

Before teaching at Cal Poly, he worked for 5 years as Assistant Professor at the Technical University in Vienna, spent one year in Mainland China in linguistic studies and worked for 3 years as a project manager in the German industry. There he developed one of the first Chinese Character Generators for an electronic ink jet printer.

Dick Liu, PhD - Adjunct Faculty

Dick Liu received a M.S. in Computer Science from Pennsylvania State University and a Ph.D. in EE (Computer Systems Research Lab) from Stanford University.

He has extensive industrial experience with start-up companies and Fortune 500 corporations both as a technologist and executive management. He was with Synopsys Inc. (Smart, Secure Everything – from Silicon to Software) for 14 years. While at Synopsys, among various RD projects, he was also responsible for the security assessment and security setup at Shanghai RD center. He established a database security process for customer data protection. And he contributed vastly to improve RD teams’ software development processes, testing effectiveness and security awareness.

His interests include: protecting cyber security, developing robust software products, and researching innovative computing technologies. He has received 10 US patents and published numerous technical papers.

Leandro Loss, PhD - Adjunct Faculty

Leandro Loss completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science in May 2009 at the University of Nevada, Reno, and spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). After working at Nokia for 3 years, he joined Nodeprime Inc. in San Francisco, where he is currently a senior data scientist and designs big data analytic frameworks. His research and work experience has been focused in computer vision and machine learning, with special application in life sciences and cloud infra-structure. He has been teaching at ITU since January 2014.

Srinivasan Mandyam, PhD - Adjunct Faculty

Dr. Srinivasan Mandyam is an adjunct faculty member at ITU.

Tony Nguyen, MS - Adjunct Faculty

Architect, design, develop, and test security software for Cisco cloud security management products (Securty Service Exchange, ACI, Firewall Threat Defense, Adaptive Security Appliance, AnyConnect VPN, Cisco Secure Desktop, Cisco Security Manager). Work with security protocols such as SSL, IPsec, VPN.

Worked on a joint project with the De Anza College, SRI, and the NSF to develop materials for scenario-based learning for enterprise network security. I taught several network security courses using this new scenario-based methodology.

He received MS Computer Engineering, Santa Clara University, CA.

Da-Qi Ren, PhD - Adjunct Faculty

Dr. Da-Qi Ren has more than 14 years of experience in industry. His research focuses on data intensive computing, big data analytics, parallel and distributed processing, and HPC software design and optimization. Dr. Ren owns 11 patents, and has written more than 60 scientific publications. He received his PhD from McGill University and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tokyo.

Zhupei Shi, PhD - Adjunct Faculty

Motivated, creative and versatile high-tech professional with a proven track record of innovations & technology leadership (46 US patents & 49 peer-reviewed papers). Intensive working experience and knowledge in area of data storage, data security, data integrity, data processing, data recovery, predictive data analytics, advanced algorithms & data structures, digital forensic technologies, network securities, model building & applied mathematics for cryptographic systems, Monte Carlo simulation to detect network/cyber security flaws, machine learning (classification & pattern recognitions). Hands-on JMP, SAS, Matlab, C/C++, Python, Hadoop, Spark, Scala etc.

He received PhD Physics, New York University, New York.

Richard Sun, PhD - Core Faculty

Richard Y. Sun received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in both computer science from Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989 and 1994, respectively. Ever since he obtained his Ph.D., he has been working in the algorithm design and software development for field-programmable gate-array (FPGA) place-and- route implementation tools for more than 20 years. The companies that he worked for include well-known FPGA companies such as Xilinx Inc. and Altera Corp., Lattice Semiconductor, a low-cost low-power FPGA vendor, and Tabula Inc., an innovative programmable logic device start-up. He currently holds an R&D Director position at Synopsys Inc., the leader in electronic design automation (EDA) and semiconductor intellectual property (IP).

Richard has published 13 technical papers in various prestigious journals and conference proceedings, including IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design for Integrated Circuits and Systems, IEEE Design and Test of Computers, and Algorithmica. He also has 8 U.S. patents granted and 1 in application process. During his employment at Xilinx Inc., Richard was nominated for the Ross Freeman Award for technical innovation in both 2003 and 2004 and awarded for Design Software Division Employee Recognition Award for innovation in 2004.

Richard has been serving as a part-time teaching faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Santa Clara University, since 2007. The three courses he teaches are Physical Design in VLSI, High-Level Synthesis, and Semi-Custom Design using Programmable Logic Devices. They are all co-listed as part of the graduate-level curriculum in the Department of Computer Engineering at Santa Clara University. He is also teaching Computer Algorithms, Graph Algorithms and Applications at the graduate level in the Department of Computer Science at International Technological University.

Ming-Hwa Wang, PhD - Adjunct Faculty

Interest and experience in: Data Structures and Computer Algorithms, ComputerNetworks, Formal Languages and Compiler Constructions, Artificial Intelligence, Operating Systems, SoC Verification, Cloud Computing, Computer Graphics. Has programmed in a wide variety of languages including C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk, Erlang, SystemVerilog/OVM/DPI/Verilog/PLI/VPI, XML, HTML/CGI, OpenGL, Prolog, Lisp, Scheme, Smalltalk, Ada, Pascal and many others.

Alex Wu, PhD - Adjunct Faculty

Internally certified 6-sigma Master Black-Belt with >300 hours accrued training and problem-solving experience in design and reliability improvement, using techniques such as GR&R, DOE, and SPC charts. ASQ certified CRE/CQE (2012). 15 years hands-on industrial experience in Data Storage devices on design, system integration, and FA.

Self-motivated follower and driver to execute continuous improvement (PDCA cycle). Strong cross-functional team player, with effective project management and communication skills.

He received PhD Mechanical Engineering, UC San Diego, CA

Yurong Xu, PhD - Adjunct Faculty

His current research focuses on Wireless Sensor Networks, with an emphasis on protocols, architectures and applications in assistive environment, other interesting includes wireless systems, RFID, EKG monitoring, distributed security and time-synchronization protocols and systems.

He received PhD Computer Science, Dartmouth College, NH

Victor Yu, MA - Adjunct Faculty

Highly motivated manager, engineer and educator with result-oriented success in IT security design and implementation initiatives. His areas of expertise are in Cloud Computing, Network Security, Big Data, Security Regulatory and Product Management.

He received MA Geographical Information System from University of Akron, Akron, OH

Fang Yuan, PhD - Adjunct Faculty

In depth knowledge of statistical analysis and modeling, with strong emphasis in DOE, SPC, Time Series, Data Mining (linear regression, logistic regression, decision tree, regression tree, Neural network,CHAID); Multivariate analysis (Clustering Analysis, Principle Component Analysis etc.).

Extensive software knowledge in SAS/Enterprise Miner 5.2, Minitab, JMP. Expanded programming skills in SAS/BASE, SAS/SQL, SAS/Macro, SAS/GRAPH, R, MATLAB, Maple, FORTRAN, C etc.

She received PhD Applied Statistics, University of Alabama, AL