Faculty Members
Jacob D. Furst, Co-director
Jacob D. Furst is a Professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media (CDM) at DePaul University. His research interests are in medical informatics with applications of machine learning and data mining to medical image processing and computer vision. His current work concentrates on being able to generate semantically meaningful information about lung nodules in computed tomography images of the human torso. Dr. Furst also has a strong interest in computer security and is the director of the DePaul Information Assurance Center. He has helped design two majors and three courses in the CDM security curriculum. He has taught Secure Electronic Commerce, Social Aspects of Information Security, Information Systems Security, Host Based Security, and Introduction to Networking and Security. Dr. Furst earned his PhD in computer science from UNC Chapel Hill; he has a master's degree in education and a bachelor's degree in English literature.
Daniela Stan Raicu, Co-director
Daniela Stan Raicu is a Professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media (CDM) at DePaul University. Her research interests include medical imaging, multimedia retrieval, pattern recognition and data mining. Daniela's projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Argonne National Laboratory, Department of Education, and McArthur Foundation. She is the recipient of the DePaul Excellence in Teaching Award 2008, the DePaul Spirit of Inquiry Award in 2010, and the IBM Faculty Innovation Award in 2010. She is also the founding Director of the Data Mining and Predictive Analytics Center at DePaul and serves on the National Council of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon (UPE) honor society in Computer and Information Sciences since 2008. Daniela holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Oakland University, Michigan, a M.A. in Computer Science from Wayne State University, Michigan, and a B.S. in Mathematics from University of Bucharest, Romania.
Alexander Rasin
Alexander Rasin is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media (CDM) at DePaul University. He received his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Brown University, Providence. His current research centers on high-performance data warehouses and large scale data analytics. Dr. Rasin’s other research interests include resource provisioning, high availability guarantees in distributed systems and database forensics.
Jonathan Gemmell
Jonathan F. Gemmell is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at DePaul University. He holds a BA in Classics, an MS in Computer Science and a PhD in Computer Science. His research focuses on the social web, data analysis and artificial intelligence. He is a faculty member at the Web Intelligence Laboratory. He has published dozens of articles in international peer-reviewed conferences and journals. His previous business experience includes trading foreign currency derivatives on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and managing a trading and investment group.
Roselyne Tchoua
Roselyne Tchoua is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing, DePaul University. Her interests gravitate around making seemingly inaccessible technology or manageable amounts of data more reachable. She joined DePaul Center for Data Science to continue working in the fascinating space between computer science and other science fields, extracting insight from data using machine learning, natural language processing techniques and crowdsourcing. She received her PhD in computer science from the University of Chicago, focusing on Hybrid Human Machine Scientific Information Extraction.
Ilyas Ustun
lyas Ustun is a data scientist. Among many things he loves in the data space, data visualization is his favorite – after all, a picture is worth a thousand words. He has over 5 years of data analytics experience in various fields including transportation, vehicle re-identification, smartphone sensors, motion detection, digital agriculture, traffic safety and mobility, work zone performance analysis, and metabolomics. He earned his PhD from the Department of Modeling, Simulation, and Visualization Engineering at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on developing robust machine learning models in detecting vehicle motion from smartphone accelerometer data (without using GPS). His research interests include Data Science, Big Data Analytics, Data Visualization, Data Mining, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning.
Thiru Ramaraj
Thiru Ramaraj is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing, DePaul University, Chicago, USA. He received his BE in Computer Science & Engg. from Annamalai University, India, MS & PhD in Computer Science from Ball State University and Montana State University respectively. His research focus is mainly on Computational Biology and applied bioinformatics. Before joining DePaul University, Thiru was a Bioinformatics Research Scientist at the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR), Santa Fe, NM from 2010 – 2019 where he and his team primarily focused on developing computational workflows for high-throughput DNA/RNA sequence data analysis. He has active collaborations with Biologists, Biochemists across several Universities and research institutions. Thiru’s research work is primarily funded by the National Science Foundation.
Alexandru Orhean
Alexandru Iulian Orhean is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science in the School of Computing at the Jarvis College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University. He received his PhD in Computer Science in 2023 from Illinois Institute of Technology. He received his Bachelors of Engineering in Computer Science in 2016 from University Politehnica of Bucharest. He has interned with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Google, working on ScienceSearch and Related Image Search, respectively. During his PhD he also held the role of Lead System Administrator and Lead Cloud Architect deploying and maintaining the NSF Mystic Cloud and the Chameleon site at IIT, a $1.5M infrastructure containing 146 nodes spread over 6 racks of machines. His research expertise resides at the intersection of Parallel/Distributed Systems and Information Retrieval, currently working on the problem of efficient and effective indexing and search in large-scale scientific storage systems. His broad research interests revolve around the areas of data organization, storage and exploration, information discovery, retrieval and search, distributed indexing and search engine design, high-performance computing systems, cloud systems and databases.