Dear colleagues, alumni and friends,
This year the department will be moving to a new home in Malachowsky Hall for Data Science and Information Technology. The new building is meant to focus on collaboration and will connect students and researchers from other departments and disciplines. We look forward to the collaboration this multi-discipline space will bring.
In this issue, we feature faculty who are doing amazing work to make a positive impact on society. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected Kristy Elizabeth Boyer, Ph.D., and a team of scientists from the University of Florida and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to lead a $20 million institute to advance artificial intelligence to promote STEM education (Page 12). Kiley Graim, Ph.D. is leading a $1.5 million National Institutes of Health National Cancer Institute study to aid in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to model the evolution of cancer across hundreds of mammalian species and its correlation to humans (Page 14).
We want to celebrate our faculty for their continued efforts and recent awards and recognitions, including Baba Vemuri, Ph.D., who was named distinguished professor (Page 6), Sumi Helal, Ph.D., who was named a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) (Page 6), and Kejun Huang, Ph.D., who received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Page 7).
Beyond faculty, the department and our students had several reasons to celebrate this year. Our Computer Engineering Graduate program jumped two spots to number 13 in the U.S. News & World Report Rankings (Page 19). Patriel Stapleton, Ph.D. Student, received a graduate research fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF) (Page 21). Aysegul Bumin, Ph.D. student, along with her team recently received the best student paper award at the 13th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics for her research on fiber-based tensor completion for drug repurposing (Page 22).
Join me in congratulating our faculty and students for their successes this year. As always, we thank you for your continued support.
Sincerely,
Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D.
The Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor
Chair, Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering