William Theisen
Assistant Teaching Professor - University of Notre Dame
A huge ultimate frisbee fan who grew up in a town with two stop-lights, I am now a second year teaching professor in the department of computer science and engineering. I recieved my PhD in Computer Vision in 2024 as a member of the Computer Vision Research Lab at the University of Notre Dame. I was advised by Dr. Walter Scheirer and also worked very closely with Dr. Tim Weninger. My area of research was political memes (no that's not a joke). In addition to being a "dank memer" I also enjoy playing soccer, reading, working in my garden, and designing amateur board games!
Program Director - Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science
CSE Coordinator - Bachelor of Business Administration in Computer Science
Assistant coach of Notre Dame Papal Rage and Board Member of South Bend Ultimate
Department of Computer Science and Engineering's Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award: 2024-2025
Kaneb Center's Department of Computer Science and Engineering Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award: 2023-2024
Department of Computer Science and Engineering's Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award: 2023-2024
Resume
View Full ResumePublications
- Fear and Loathing on the Frontline: Decoding the Language of Othering by Russia-Ukraine War Bloggers (2024)
- Motif Mining: Towards Multimodal Retrieval for Discovering Disinformation Trends in Social Media* (2024)
- N-Modal Contrastive Losses with Applications to Social Media Data in Trimodal Space* (2024)
- An Avalanche of Images on Telegram Preceded Russia's Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine* (2024)
- C-CLIP: Contrastive Image-Text Encoders to Close the Descriptive-Commentative Gap* (2023)
- Image Provenance Analysis (2022)
- Motif Mining: Finding and Summarizing Remixed Image Content* (2022)
- MEWS: Real-time Social Media Manipulation Detection and Analysis (2022)
- Artificial Intelligence for Peace: An Early Warning System for Mass Violence (2021)
- Automatic Discovery of Political Meme Genres with Diverse Appearences* (2020)
- * denotes first author
Academic Experience
- Assistant Teaching Professor: Fall 2024 - Present
- Graduate Instructor: Programming Challenges, Fall 2023
- Graduate Instructor: Programming Paradigms, Spring 2023
- Graduate Teaching Assistant: Computer Security, Spring 2019
- Graduate Teaching Assistant: Operating System Principles, Fall 2018
- Teaching Assistant: Systems Programming, Spring 2018
- Teaching Assistant: Operating System Principles, Fall 2017
- Teaching Assistant: Systems Programming, Spring 2017
- Research Assistant: Bluffton University under Dr. Steve Harnish, Summer 2016
- Research Assistant: Ohio Northern University under Dr. Jason Pinkney, Summer 2013
Education
- Graduate: University of Notre Dame, PhD Candidate (2022-2024)
- Graduate: University of Notre Dame, PhD Student (2018-2022)
- Undergraduate: University of Notre Dame, Computer Science (2014-2018)
- High School: Bluffton High School, (2010-2014)
Work Experience
- Research Intern: Redhat Research, Summer 2022
- Software Engineering Intern: Nyhart Consulting, Summer 2017
- Private Consultant: Python Software Foundation, Summer 2016
- Fry Cook: Wendy's, Summer 2016
