Profiles

Mary Lai Salvana is an assistant professor of statistics at the University of Connecticut. She earned her Ph.D. in statistics from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Saudi Arabia. Before joining the University of Connecticut, she held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Houston. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in applied mathematics from Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines in 2015 and 2016, respectively.

Her research focuses on the statistical modeling of extreme and catastrophic events, risk and disasters, with an emphasis on spatial and spatio-temporal statistics, environmental and computational statistics, large-scale data science, and high-performance computing.

• Multivariate space-time statistics
• Environmental statistics
• High performance computing
• Extreme events, risks, disasters
• Climate change

Mattia Soldan is a final-year Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at KAUST, where he is advised by Prof. Bernard Ghanem. His research lies at the intersection of computer vision and natural language processing, with a focus on scalable and efficient algorithms for semantic video understanding and retrieval. His work spans task-specific deep learning architectures, dataset creation, and efficient visual encoding pipelines. Mattia is passionate about building intelligent systems that connect visual content with language and advancing research that bridges fundamental understanding with practical impact.

Mattia's research focuses on video and language understanding and especially on how to leverage mutual information to solve specific tasks as Single Video Moment Retrieval and Video Corpus Moment Retrieval.

Małgorzata Forystek is a Statistics Master's student at the Bayesian Computational Statistics & Modeling research group  (BAYESCOMP) under the supervision of Professor Håvard Rue. She received her B.Sc. degree in Applied Mathematics from AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Poland, in 2023.

Her research interest is mainly in Bayesian and computational Statistics and Data Science.

Michal A. Mankowski completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at KAUST in 2020 and was a postdoctoral research fellow in the TREES research group. He is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Surgery at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, where his research focuses on data-driven approaches to organ transplantation and healthcare systems.

Michal's research focuses on the intersection of theoretical computer science and applied data science, specifically addressing optimization challenges within complex systems.

Michał Forystek received his B.Sc. degree in Information and Communication Technology from AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Poland, in 2023.

He has a 2 years of experience as a Java Developer working for IG Group in Kraków.

Currently he is a Computer Science Master's student at the Secure Next Generation Resilient Systems Lab (SENTRY) under the supervision of Professor Charalambos Konstantinou.

Michał's research involves using Load Altering Attacks to exploit the Load Frequency Control in Power Systems and developing the appropriate countermeasures.

Research Interests

Motasem is interested in computer vision, machine learning, and continual learning.