Paschalidis New Director of Hariri Institute

The Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering has a new director. Distinguished Professor of Engineering Yannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE) is overseeing the institute’s move into a new building (the largest on the Charles River Campus), the Center for Computing & Data Sciences

The appointment adds to his already impressive portfolio. Paschalidis previously directed BU’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE), which researches and designs intelligent data systems. He cowrote the proposal that won BU a matching state grant for the University’s new RASTIC robotics lab, which will enable more undergraduate and master’s students to research and test next-gen robots and artificial intelligence.

The Center for Computing & Data Sciences, which opened this year, represents BU’s planting the flag in a field that is remaking academic disciplines—and society. Among Hariri’s neighbors in the building will be the new Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences and the College of Arts & Sciences departments of computer science and of mathematics and statistics.

“Putting all of these groups under the same roof, I think, will further facilitate interactions,” Paschalidis says.

Beyond the move, he says he has three priorities as the institute’s new leader, the first involving forging closer ties to the School of Medicine. “I feel—and I think the University agrees—that we have not leveraged as much as possible the fact that we have a medical school,” he says. “And I think there’s much more that can be done” to arrange collaborations between engineers and computer scientists and doctors—those who do research as well as healers on the hospital ward. “There is a lot of activity these days around AI and health,

AI and medicine, automation, new sensing technologies that would improve the way we can sense on a daily basis what happens, identify diseases, find new biomarkers.

“I want to increase the interaction between the people who are doing the science, the technology, and the algorithms, and the people who are in medicine and health.”

A second initiative will be to maintain “the service aspect of Hariri” to BU professors, including the institute’s fellows program, which provides research support to junior faculty and to students. That support also brings different disciplines together in “community-building activity,” he says.

The third will be to continue “focused research,” that is, “internal funding mechanisms for encouraging groups at the University to coalesce around a specific field” in yearlong research teams. “The main objective is to form teams that will then have enough cohesion and enough preliminary work so that they can go out, write a proposal [for competitive grant funding] and be successful.” —

RICH BARLOW