Advisors

Allan Knight

Computer Science Professor at UCR

I am a passionate and accomplished software engineer, researcher and architect with extensive experience in developing software for real-time collaboration, telecommunications, VoIP solutions, medical devices, and high performance networking. Specifically, I have worked on everything from scaling up high performance distributed servers, to distributed control systems and even on user facing collaboration endpoints. More recently I have started working directly on consumer products with contributions to firmware for small electronic devices and programming and testing apps for those products on the production line.

My research interests include multicore programming, automatic integration of educational media, and facilitation of evaluating educational media techniques.

Specialties: Problem solving, software engineering processes, build environment, OO Analysis & Design, VoIP solutions, Audio Processing, Training, C++, C, Java, JavaScript, PERL, Ruby, TCL, Android, iOS, Windows RT, sockets, threads, Linux, Mac, Qt GUI Framework, SIP, RTP, RTCP.

Andreína Vivas Thomas

Advisory Software Engineer at Lenovo

Andreína Vivas Thomas is a cloud solution engineer at Lenovo with 8+ years of experience in the server industry. She received her Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering (dual) from New York University in 2017. During her free time she loves to scuba dive, ski and hike the Pacific Northwest.

Christopher Lynch

Dean of Engineering at UCR

Dr. Christopher S. Lynch was named the fourth dean of the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering in 2018 and is the William R. Johnson Jr. Family Chair. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Most recently, he served as chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles and also previously served as director of the No. 1 ranked Master of Science in Engineering Online Program at UCLA. A distinguished leader, Dean Lynch is a Fellow of ASME and SPIE, was the 2014 recipient of the SPIE Smart Materials and Structures Lifetime Achievement Award, and has issued more than 100 refereed publications and more than 80 conference publications.

Vagelis Papalexakis

Computer Science Professor

I am a Full Professor and the Ross Family Chair at the Computer Science & Engineering Department at the University of California Riverside, working broadly on data mining, machine learning, and data science research. Most recently, I have been focusing on developing Safe and Trustworthy AI models for Science and Engineering. You can get a quick idea about my research by browsing through my list of publications.

A major focus of my research is tensor decompositions for machine learning and data science. In order to get a better idea of this research area, feel free to check out two relevant recent surveys that I have co-authored: one geared more towards data science practitioners and one geared more towards the fundamental concepts necessary to start algorithmic research in the area.

My work has attracted a number of distinctions, including the 2017 SIGKDD Dissertation Award (runner-up), the National Science Foundation CAREER award, the 2021 IEEE DSAA Next Generation Data Scientist Award, the ICDM 2022 Tao Li Award , and the 2025 PAKDD Early Career Researcher Award which award excellence in early-career researchers. Finally, I am honored to be a National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering alumnnus (class of 2025)!