Sr. Executive Associate Dean Mathew J. Palakal will be stepping down from his leadership role at IU Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at IUPUI at the end of June, 2023. Professor Davide Bolchini, chair of the Human-Centered Computing Department at the school, will become Executive Associate Dean on July 1. Associate Professor Andrew Miller will succeed Bolchini as department chair. Also, on July 1, Professor Shiaofen Fang will be joining Luddy IUPUI as the new Associate Dean for Research.
Mathew Palakal (above left)
Beginning in 1988, Mathew J. Palakal has served IUPUI in several important and influential roles, notably as Chair of the Dept of Computer Science in the Purdue School of Science at IUPUI, Director of the Informatics Research Institute, and most recently as the Sr. Exec. Assoc. Dean at the IU Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at IUPUI. Over his 35 years of service to the university, he has contributed to the sustained growth and expansion of STEM-related degree programs at IUPUI, nearly doubling revenue at Luddy IUPUI and increasing the school’s overall enrollment by 82% between 2013 and 2022.
He has been a tireless advocate for diversity in informatics education, working closely with area organizations and internationally. Two of his most profound contributions and examples of leadership are the founding and continued success of the Informatics Diversity-Enhanced Workforce (iDEW) and Leading Informatics for Tomorrow (LiFT) programs at IUPUI. iDEW has provided computing instruction to over 2500 underserved students at eight Indianapolis-area high schools and prepared them for college and the workforce and has been used to train over 500 Hoosier middle and high school teachers on computing curriculum. The initiative has received local and national recognition for its mission to expand STEM education to underrepresented populations.
Davide Bolchini (above right)
Davide Bolchini received his Licentiate and Ph.D. in Communication Sciences from the University of Lugano, Switzerland. Before joining Indiana University in 2008, he was visiting senior research fellow in England at University College London on a Swiss National Science Foundation Fellowship for Advanced Researchers. He previously held a post-doctoral research and teaching position at the University of Lugano in Switzerland, lecturing appointments at the Politecnico di Milano in Italy, and visiting research positions at North Carolina State University and at the University of Toronto.
His research interests include modeling requirements for data-intensive interactive applications, interaction design languages, usability evaluation methods, healthcare user interfaces, and accessible computing for the blind and visually impaired. Bolchini has contributed to over 120 peer-reviewed publications and has received over $3.2M in grant funding from the NSF and Google. He has been with Luddy IUPUI since 2008, founded the HCC department as chair in 2013, and is currently a Professor of Human-Computer Interaction.
Andrew Miller
Andrew Miller received his Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech and is currently Associate Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and interim co-director of the Human-Computer Interaction program at Luddy IUPUI.
Miller studies how social computing technology can empower people to help each other with their health and wellness. Designing pervasive technologies to encourage and enable new forms of social support online and offline, he works with youth as participants to shape both technical systems and in-the-wild deployments. He is a member of the program committee for the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and has a well-established record of NSF- and NIH-funded interdisciplinary research, including an NSF CAREER Award.
Shiaofen Fang
Shiaofen Fang is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer and Information Science at Purdue School of Science at IUPUI. He is also Director of the IUPUI Institute of Integrative Artificial Intelligence.
Fang’s primary research interests are in data visualization, medical image analysis, interactive AI, and volume graphics. His early research focus had been on volume visualization and volume graphics with emphasis on efficient rendering and modeling techniques of scientific data. These include deformable volume modeling and rendering, hardware assisted voxelization, 3D microscopy visualization, and immersive volume visualization. His recent research interests are focused more on data visualization, visual analytics, interactive AI and their application in brain connectome image analysis, 3D facial image analysis for medical diagnosis, healthcare data visualization, and spatiotemporal visualization.
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