People

Faculty



David Irwin

ProfessorUniversity of Massachusetts AmherstElectrical and Computer Departmentdeirwin@umass.eduKnowles 215C413-545-5822

Ph.D. Students




Talha Mehboob

Knowles 206tmehboob@umass.edu
Talha is a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering with research interests in cloud computing. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad, Pakistan.  Prior to joining UMass Amherst, he worked as Research Assistant at TUKL-NUST Research Development Center and SIGMA Labs Islamabad. He is co-advised by Prof. Michael Zink

Xiaoding (Rebecca) Guan

Knowles 206gxiaoding@umass.edu 
Rebecca is a Ph.D. student in Electrical Engineering with research interests in energy informatics and sustainable computing. She previously received her M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UMass Amherst, and her B.E. in Telecommunications Engineering from Shanghai Normal University. 

Thanathorn (Tammy) Sukprasert

Knowles 206tsukprasert@umass.edu
Tammy is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science with research interests in systems software.  She received her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UMass Amherst.  She is co-advised by Prof. Prashant Shenoy.

John Thiede

Knowles 206jthiede@umass.edu
John is a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering with research interests in energy-efficient and sustainable computing.  John received his B.A. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Iowa.

Ph.D. Alumni


Noman Bashir


Noman received his Ph.D. in Spring, 2022 in Electrical and Computer Engineering after defending his dissertation Improving the Programmability of Networked Energy Systems, which enables the programmability of energy systems to improve their reliability, scalability, explainability, and efficiency. He received his M.S. in Energy Systems Engineering from the National University of Science  and Technology (NUST) and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology Lahore, both in Pakistan.  Prior to joining UMass on a Fulbright Scholarship, he  worked as a Research Assistant at AdCom and at SysNet research labs at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). During his Ph.D. he interned for Google and VMware, and continued as a post-doctoral research associate in the Computer Science at UMass Amherst. 

Akansha Singh Bansal


Akansha received her Ph.D. in Fall 2021 in Electrical and Computer Engineering after defending her dissertation Data-Driven Control, Modeling, and Forecasting for Residential Solar Power, which leveraged data from the newest generation of satellites to improve solar power management.  Prior to joining UMass Amherst, she worked at NTU Singapore as Research Associate in the School of Computer Science. She received her M.S. by Research from IIIT-Bangalore and a B.Tech in Computer Science from MDU Rohtak in India. After graduation, Akansha jointed as a post-doctoral fellow at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere at CSU and the NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES). 

Pradeep Ambati


Pradeep received his Ph.D. in Summer, 2021 in Electrical and Computer Engineering after defending his dissertation Cost-Efficient Resource Provisioning for Cloud-Enabled Schedulers, which leveraged the many resource contracts offered by cloud platforms to optimize the cost of cloud schedulers.  He also received his M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UMass Amherst in Summer, 2017 after defending his thesis AutoPlug: An Automated Metadata Service for Smart Outlets, which focused on applying machine learning to classify electrical devices based on their electrical usage.  He interned at Yahoo! Oath, Microsoft Research, and Facebook during his Ph.D., and joined as a Research Scientist at Facebook after graduation. 

Supreeth Shastri


Supreeth received his Ph.D. in Summer, 2018 in Electrical and Computer Engineering after defending his dissertation System Support for Managing Risk in Cloud Computing Platforms, which identified a number of implicit risks that cloud platforms expose to users and developed techniques for cost-effectively mitigating those risks. He subsequently completed a post-doc in the Computer Science department at the University of Texas at Austin, and subsquently took a job as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Iowa.

Dong Chen


Dong received his Ph.D. in Summer, 2018 in Electrical and Computer Engineering after defending his dissertation Hybrid Black-box Solar Analytics and their Privacy Implications, which developed hybrid techniques for modeling solar-powered systems that mixed physical and machine learning models.  His dissertationn showed that these techniques could compromise the anonymity of energy data by revealing location, occupancy, and energy usage. He subsequently accepted a tenure-track faculty position in the Computer Science department at Florida International University, and is currently tenure-track faculty at the Colorado School of Mines.

Sean Barker


Sean received his Ph.D. in Summer, 2014 in Computer Science (co-advised with Prashant Shenoy) after defending his dissertation Model-Driven Analytics of Energy Meter Data in Smart Homes, which developed a model-driven approach for efficiently extracting actionable information from smart meter data in real time. He subsequently accepted a tenure-track faculty position in the Computer Science department at Bowdoin College. 

M.S. Alumni





Zain Mustafa


Zain received his M.S. in Fall, 2014 in Electrical and Computer Engineering after defending his thesis Energy Agile Cluster Communication, which developed a technique for efficiently shuffling distributed data in a cluster that operates on intermittent renewable power. His work was published at ACM ICPE 2016. Zain subsequently accepted a position as a Data Scientist for IBM. 

Xue Ouyang


Xue received her M.S. in Spring, 2016 in Electrical and Computer Engineering after defending her thesis SpotLight: An Information Service for the Cloud, which developed a technique for efficiently "probing" cloud platforms to learn their availability, failure, and price characteristics that were previously hidden. Her work was published at IEEE ICDCS 2016. Xue subsequently accepted a position as a Software Engineer at Amazon Web Services. 

Jiannan Tian


Jiannan received his M.S. in Spring, 2017 in Electrical and Computer Engineering after defending his thesis Analyzing the Performance of Spark on Spot Instances, which focused on optimizing the checkpointing interval of Spark applications on the probability that a spot instance will be revoked to minimize cost. Jiannan subsequently continued his research as Ph.D. student at the University of Alabama. 

Mythili Anbazhagan


Mythili received her M.S. in May, 2019 in Electrical and Computer Engineering after defending her thesis An Empirical Analysis of Network Traffic: IoT Device Profiling and Classification, which passively collected network traffic from over 300 Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in a live deployment for nearly a year and developed a technique to classify devices based on their network data. Mythili subsequently co-founded a startup company X4plore.