Our PhD Students

PhD students graduated from the Computer and Information Science Department have been recruited as faculty members in universities including University of Chicago, Rochester Institute of Technology, DePaul University, University of Michigan - Flint, Central Michigan University, Kuwait University, and King Faisal University as well as technology leaders in industrial companies/centers including Microsoft, eBay, Amazon, Ford, GM, and Quicken Loans.

CIS PhD Student Md Abul Kalam Azad

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. Candidate 
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Instructor / Graduate Student Research Assistant
• Research Focus: Computing Systems and Software Engineering
• Career Focus: Academia or Indsutry Research
• E-mail: akazad@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Ouael Ben Amara

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. Candidate 
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Instructor / Graduate Student Research Assistant
• Research Focus: Machine Learning, Probabilistic Programming, ExplainableAI
• Career Focus: Research, Entrepreneurship
• E-mail: benamara@umich.edu 

CIS PhD Student Firas Ben Hmida

• Program: Ph.D  in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D Student
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Instructor/Research Assistant
• Research Focus: Trustworthy Machine Learning
• Career Focus:  Industrial Research
• E-mail: fbhmida@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Avishak Chakroborty

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. pre-candidate
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Research Assistant
• Research Focus: Software Engineering, Continuous Deployment
• Career Focus: Mobile DevOps, Machine Learning, Code Analysis
• E-mail: avishak@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Kapotaksha Das

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. Candidate
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Instructor
• Research Focus: Multimodal Deep Learning for detecting Human States
• Career Focus: Building models and systems to improve medical processes
• E-mail: takposha@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Houyi Du

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. Candidate
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Instructor / Graduate Student Research Assistant
• Research Focus:  Universal approximation theorem, Reinforcement Learning
• Career Focus: Academia/industrial
• E-mail: houyidu@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Zaid Ghazal

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. pre-candidate
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Research Assistant
• Research Focus: Failure Reasoning for Cyber-Physical Systems
• Career Focus: Autonomous Driving Systems + Machine Learning  + Validation Testing
• E-mail: zghazal@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Sami Hadouaj

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. Candidate 
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Research Assistant/Graduate Student Instructor
• Research Focus: Databases/ Probabilistic reasoning/ Machine learning 
• Career Focus: Research
• E-mail: shadouaj@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Philemon Hailemariam

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: PhD Student
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Research Assistant/Graduate Student Instructor
• Research Focus: Trustworthy machine learning 
• Career Focus: AI Security 
• E-mail: philemon@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Zhengquan Li

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. Candidate
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Research Assistant
• Research Focus: Edge Computing and Distributed Systems 
• Career Focus: Industry or Academia 
• E-mail: zqli@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Khairul Mottakin

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science 
•  Status: Ph.D. Candidate 
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Instructor and Graduate Research Assistant 
• Research Focus: WiFi Sensing, Indoor Localization  
• Career Focus: Aspiring to advance research and development in wireless sensing technologies, with a particular focus on indoor localization and surveillance systems. Interested in applying WiFi sensing techniques to smart cities, smart homes, smart roads, and IoT applications. Passionate about both academic research and industry-driven innovation in the field of wireless communication and sensing. 
• E-mail: khairulm@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Sambathchatovong Na

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science 
• Status: PhD Student
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Instructor
• Research Focus: Data Security, Data Privacy, and Public Policy
• Career Focus: Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Consultant, Professor, and Researcher 
• E-mail: navong@umich.edu 

CIS PhD Student Ziba Parsons

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science 
• Status: Ph.D. Candidate 
• Position: Graduate Student Instructor 
• Research Focus: Federated Learning 
• Career Focus: Machine Learning, Data Science 
• Email: zibapars@umich.edu 

CIS PhD Student Kais Riani

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. Candidate
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Research Assistant / Graduate Student Instructor
• Research Focus: Facial Thermal Regions Mapping for Human State Recognition
• Career Focus: Academia and Industrial Research
• E-mail: kriani@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Dhia Rzig

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. Candidate 
• Position: Graduate Student Instructor/ Graduate Student Research Assistant
• Research Focus: DevOps for ML Projects
• Career Focus: Applying research innovations to large scale production environments. 
• Email: dhiarzig@umich.edu 

CIS PhD Student Soham Saha

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Sciences
• Status: PhD Student
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Research Assistant 
• Research Focus: Reinforcement Learning 
• Career Focus: Applied RL, Human-Centered AI, Machine Learning Solutions 
• E-mail: sohams@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Salem Sharak

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. Candidate
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Instructor
• Research Focus: Multimodal Machine Learning, NLP
• Career Focus: Academia
•  E-mail: sharak@umich.edu
  
   

CIS PhD Syed Salauddin Mohammad Tariq

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. Candidate
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Instructor / Graduate Student Research Assistant
• Research Focus: HPC, Program Analysis and Cloud Computing
• Career Focus: Industry and Academia
• E-mail: ssmtariq@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Boshen Wang

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D. Candidate
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Instructor/Graduate Student Research Assistant
• Research Focus: Computational Game Theory, Multi-Agent Systems, Machine Learning
• Career Focus: Teaching or Industry
• E-mail: boshenw@umich.edu

CIS PhD Student Hadiza Yusuf

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Ph.D Student
• Position / Appointment: Graduate Student Research Assistant
• Research Focus: Falsification of AI-enabled Cyber-Physical-Systems
• Career Focus: Academia/Industrial Research
• E-mail: hyusuf@umich.edu

A. Amich

• Program: Ph.D. Computer and Information Science 
• Status: Graduated December 2024
• Research Focus: Adversarial Machine Learning for Malware Detectors
• Career Focus: Academia and Industry
• E-mail: aamich@umich.edu

Robert Kaster

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Graduated Winter 2024
• Position / Appointment: chief technical expert, Bosch 
• Career Focus: Automotive cybersecurity
• E-mail: rkaster@umich.edu

 Jeffrey J. Yackley

• Program: Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science
• Status: Graduated Summer 2022
• Position / Appointment: Assistant Professor of Computer Science, College of Innovation & Technology, University of Michigan - Flint
• Career Focus: Academia / Software Engineering / Cybersecurity / Computer Science Education 
• E-mail: jyackley@umich.edu