Grace Yang and Muthu Venkitasubramaniam Promoted to Professor

Prof. Grace Yang and Prof. Muthuramakrishnan (Muthu) Venkitasubramaniam have been promoted to the rank of Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University. Their promotions recognize their outstanding scholarship, exemplary teaching, and dedicated service to both the university and the field of computer science. A big congratulations to both!

Prof. Yang leads the InfoSense (Information Retrieval and Sense-Making) group. Her current research focuses on deep reinforcement learning, interactive agents, search engines, and privacy-preserving information retrieval. Her work has been supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), including an NSF CAREER Award. Prof. Yang is an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Information Systems and has held numerous leadership roles in the research community, including general co-chair of SIGIR 2024 and leading organizer for multiple TREC and SIGIR workshops. She is also a co-author of the 2016 book Dynamic Information Retrieval Modeling.

Prof. Yang on the career milestone:

“I have been working in AI and machine learning for over twenty years, ever since I built my first question-answering system as a senior student. It is thrilling that our subject has become so influential in people’s lives and is transforming the world. I am dedicated to creating and training machines—much like how I would train my dog or raise my kid—to be more and more intelligent and able to collaborate with humans for a better future.”

Prof. Venkitasubramaniam was a CI Fellow at NYU and Columbia University and an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Rochester prior to joining Georgetown. His research interests are in cryptography, network security, and complexity theory. His work has received funding from the NSF, IARPA, DARPA, JP Morgan, and Google. Prof. Venkitasubramaniam is the co-inventor of Ligero ZK-SNARK and the co-founder and CEO of Ligero Inc.

Prof. Venkitasubramaniam on the career milestone:

“My research sits at the intersection of theory and practice in cryptography. As I step into this role, I want to advance the science at its core while ensuring those advances shape the world responsibly by protecting privacy, guiding regulation, and helping make emerging technologies safer for society.”