The Department of Computer Science welcomes a new faculty member for Spring '26, Eric Ewing, PhD, assistant professor of instruction. Ewing comes to UIowa from Brown University, where he taught previously, and also earned his PhD in 2024. His research interests are in multi-robot systems, multi-agent pathfinding, and combinatorial optimization.

Ewing is currently teaching  an Informatics project as well as a course in coordinated mobile robotics. "I want students to get hands on experience with robotics and coordinating multiple robots together. I'm hoping that students will be able to understand robots they encounter in their lives and have a curiosity about how those systems can be improved."

Ewing studies the intersection of deep learning and optimization with a particular focus on large scale multi-robot coordination tasks. "I have two primary interests in computer science. The first is the study of multi-robot coordination and how we can organize and plan for large systems of many robots so that the robots don't collide with each other and accomplish their tasks. We clearly see large improvements in single robot systems (e.g., Waymo self-driving cars, household robots, cleaning robots), but how we can coordinate these robots together efficiently is still an open question!" he explains.

"My second interest is the intersection of deep learning and optimization. I'm interested in how we can use deep learning models to improve the performance of our optimization algorithms. For instance, can we use deep learning to predict which branches should be pruned or explored first, which constraints should be added first, or predict how we can simplify problems without losing performance."