This year, the School of Information Technology is excited to welcome four new faculty members: Zhenhao Li, Xuan Luo, Zisis Poulos, and Liang Xue.
“We are delighted to have these four new faculty members join our School,” said Professor Enamul Hoque Prince, Director of the School of Information Technology. “Their unique insights and diverse expertise will enrich our academic community, enhance the education of future IT professionals, and contribute to addressing both local and global challenges through innovative research and scholarship.”
Zhenhao Li
Zhenhao Li will join as an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Technology from January 2025. Dr. Li’s primary research interest is in software engineering, including AIOps, code intelligence, mining software repositories, and empirical software engineering. His research outcomes have been published in premier software engineering venues such as ICSE, ASE, ISSTA, and TSE. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Concordia University, Canada, in 2022. He is the recipient of prestigious awards such as the Doctoral Research Scholarship from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies (FRQNT) and the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE 2024.
Xuan Luo
Xuan Luo joins as a Lecturer at the School of Information Technology. She is a graduating Ph.D. student at Simon Fraser University under the supervision of Prof. Jian Pei. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Tongji University and her Master’s degree from the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Prof. Victor C.M. Leung. Her research interests lie in the broad area of data science, with a particular focus on data valuation in data markets and machine learning. She is also an expert in blockchain, with a focus on the scalability and interpretability of blockchain systems. Her research findings have been published in top venues, including conferences and journals such as SIGMOD, VLDB, SIGKDD, and Knowledge and Information Systems
Zissis Poulos
Zissis Poulos is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Technology at York University. Prior to joining York University, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management. Zissis received his Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2014 and 2018, respectively. His research focuses on machine learning applied to derivatives hedging, risk management, and volatility modeling, applications of natural language processing in the analysis of financial soft information, and generative models for financial data. His research interests also extend to distributed ledger technologies and decentralized finance. From 2017 to 2019 Zissis served as project coordinator for NSERC COHESA, a Canada-wide strategic network whose goal is to promote research in the intersection of hardware design and AI. In 2019, he co-founded Tartan AI, a Toronto-based startup designing compute and compression engines for high-performance and energy-efficient deep learning.
Liang Xue
Liang Xue joins as an Assistant Professor at the School of Information Technology. She received her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2022. Following that, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Computer Science, University of Guelph. Her research interests include applied cryptography, cybersecurity, data security and privacy in cloud computing and the Internet of Things, blockchain security and privacy, and privacy-preserving artificial intelligence. She has numerous publications in leading security and privacy journals, such as IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, among others. Additionally, she has presented her research at prestigious conferences, including the IEEE International Conference on Communications and the International Conference on Privacy, Security, and Trust.