One of the deepest joys of academic life is watching the people you mentor grow into colleagues and leaders in their own right. This season brought one of those moments, and I want to share it.
Sumon Biswas, who earned his PhD with our group at Iowa State, has joined Case Western Reserve University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer and Data Sciences. Before moving to Cleveland, Sumon spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Institute for Software Research, where he broadened the reach of his doctoral work.
Sumon’s research sits at the meeting point of software engineering and artificial intelligence. His dissertation took on a hard and important question: how do we reason about and verify fairness in machine learning pipelines, so that the systems we build treat people equitably. That work, and the responsible AI engineering agenda it opened, is exactly the kind of research our field needs right now.
Sumon, congratulations. The students at Case Western are fortunate to have you. I look forward to seeing the group you build and the questions you take on next. You can follow his work at sumonbis.github.io.