CHAIR’S MESSAGE

MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR

Dear colleagues, alumni and friends,

A new year brings new celebrations. This year, the department is celebrating 50 incredible years of innovation. The department was officially created in 1972, and since then, we’ve seen thousands of students pass through our halls. As we embark on the new year, we look forward to teaching the computer scientists of the future and creating a new generation of problem solvers.

In this issue, we feature faculty who are doing amazing work to make a positive impact on society. Kevin R.B. Butler, Ph.D., and a team of researchers are using a $7.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to examine the needs of marginalized and vulnerable populations among security and privacy technologies (Page 12). Jaime Ruiz, Ph.D., is using a $2.8 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to augment human cognition by providing task guidance through AR headsets (Page 11). A paper by Brendan David-John, a Ph.D. student, was nominated as a Best Journal Paper at an IEEE VR conference and described how the prevalence of eyetracking technology is causing significant possibilities for violating user privacy expectations (Page 20).

We want to celebrate our faculty for their continued efforts and recent awards and recognitions, including Sanjay Ranka, Ph.D., and Baba Vemuri, Ph.D., who were named distinguished professors (Page 6), Benjamin Lok, Ph.D., who was inducted as a member into the inaugural class of the IEEE Virtual Reality Academy (Page 6), and Christina Gardner-McCune, Ph.D., who received the 2022 AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator award for her work with the Artificial Intelligence for K-12 Initiative (Page 10). Our faculty also received some major grants that will have a significant influence on healthcare and education. Baba C. Vemuri, Ph.D., received a grant to resolve the limitations of MRI for the purpose of differential diagnosis of neurodegenerative disorders (Page 8). My T. Thai, Ph.D., is working in the field of AI to explore ways to increase the trustworthiness and interpretability of artificial machine learning in healthcare (Page 10). Kristy E. Boyer, Ph.D., and Mehmet Celepkolu, Ph.D., are using an NSF grant to explore ways to integrate AI learning into middle school science (Page 9). And Vincent Bindschaedler, Ph.D., and Dr. Butler will use AI techniques in combination with system security mechanisms to curtail the effects of surveillanceware (Page 14).

Beyond faculty, the department and our students had several reasons to celebrate this year. The UF Online Bachelor’s program ranks No. 1 (Page 16), according to the U.S. News & World Report. Four students received Outstanding Achievement Awards from the UF International Center (Page 21). One student received a Meta Ph.D. Fellowship (Page 18), and another received the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (Page 19).

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

Juan E. Gilbert, Ph.D. The Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Professor & CISE Department Chair