Welcome New Faculty

Samuel dov gordon, Assistant Professor, Computer Science

Samuel (Dov) Gordon received a BA in computer science from Columbia University in 2003, and a PhD in computer science from the University of Maryland in 2010. He was a postdoctoral student at Columbia University from 2010 to 2012 and a recipient of the Computing Innovations Fellowship. He now joins George Mason University after spending three years (2012–15) as a research scientist at Applied Communication Sciences, where he performed research in cryptography and in cyber and network security.

His research explores new cryptographic techniques for protecting data without sacrifcing its utility. In particular, he is interested in fnding ways to search encrypted data or to compute on encrypted data without revealing the underlying content.

thomas latoza, Assistant Professor, Computer Science

Thomas LaToza received a BS in psychology and a BS in computer science from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign in 2004. In 2012, he received a PhD in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Most recently, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. He has also worked in the Human Interactions in Programming group at Microsoft Research.

LaToza’s research interests are in the area of software engineering, encompassing both empirical and design work on environments for programming, software design, and collaboration. His recent research focuses on crowdsourcing software engineering, investigating new models and interactions for enabling short, highly parallel contributions to software projects. His research is partially supported by the National Science Foundation with a $1.4 million grant on crowd programming. His research has been featured on TechWire and ACM TechNews.

LaToza is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, has served on various program committees, and has served as a reviewer for journals such as Transactions on Software Engineering. He was co-chair of the Second International Workshop on Crowdsourcing in Software Engineering and currently serves as co-chair of the Sixth Workshop on the Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools.

hemant Purohit,

Assistant Professor, Department of Information Sciences and Technology

Hemant Purohit is an interdisciplinary researcher whose interests lie at the intersection of computing and social sciences. His educational journey started with a bachelor’s degree in communication and computer engineering from the LNM Institute of Information Technology, India in 2009. He pursued an integrated MS and PhD program in computer science and engineering at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio, under the supervision of Professor Amit Sheth, and worked at the Ohio Center of Excellence in Knowledge-enabled Computing (Kno.e.sis) until his graduation in 2015. At this time he collaborated with experts in cognitive science, public health, and global humanitarian technologies as part of a number of interdisciplinary projects at Kno.e.sis. This work included

a National Science Foundation social computational systems grant on organizational sense making during crises.

Purohit’s PhD work focused on mining social media communities for designing a cooperative system between citizens and organizations by addressing the problems of intent mining and user engagement via fusion of top-down and bottom-up computing approaches. His future interests include physicalcyber-social computing for cooperative systems.

As a volunteer, he applied his research to real-world crisis coordination during the 2014 Jammu and Kashmir foods, which garnered much mainstream media coverage. He was selected from among 150 international applicants as a 2014 ITU Young Innovator for social entrepreneurship by the United Nations’ ICT agency. He was also one of the eight international 2013 fellows of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Google, and ICT4Peace at the infuential annual humanitarian conference of CrisisMappers. He has jointly presented tutorials at top conferences and organized workshops on crisis computing.

katherine russell, Instructor, Computer Science

Russell received a BS in computer science in 2007 from the University of Maryland University College and an MS in computer science in 2012 from George Mason University. She is a PhD candidate in computer science. Her research areas include researching multiagent systems, swarm intelligence, and multirobotics.

Russell has previously taught courses for the Computer Science Department in information systems and has published papers in multirobotics, swarm robotics, and reasoning using a computational theory of evidence. She has been a member of Mason’s RoboCup Team (2010–12) and is a professional web developer.

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