Vision for Informatics
Department
Geoffrey Fox
General Principles/Characteristics
n As chair, I would
• Provide vision for a department consistent with school leadership • Interact with faculty and work for their success
• Implement and manage needed department wide functions
• Link with other organizations including school, university and (inter)
national entities.
n Set up Department wide activities that will build on our
successes and provide more resources (money) and opportunities for faculty to pursue their interests
n Need key hires that will provide synergistic linkage between
existing faculty and so enhance existing research.
n Shared departmental principles including excellence in research
and education and multidisciplinary work
• But different implementation mechanisms in different faculty
groups within Informatics.
Near Term Actions
n Visiting committee of 10-12 distinguished outside experts
• Majority of the committee would come from faculty suggestions and be
supportive of and expert in the key sub-disciplines in the department.
• Committee chair and a few (1-2) others would be tasked with leading
cross disciplinary suggestions.
• Mainly academic but have 1 or 2 Industry representatives.
• Focus on research and the graduate program but could comment more
broadly.
n Ask faculty to produce the equivalent of an Online Annual
Report describing the department activities.
• Outreach internally and external to department • Help the proposed visiting committee.
n Establish faculty group to propose a governance structure for
intra department and external interactions
• Enable broad involvement with fair, open, transparent governance
• Minimizes the time the faculty have to spend on service while maximizing
Department wide Activities I
n Initiate new department wide initiatives exploiting innovative
and unique structure of the Informatics department
n Department wide REU (Research Experience for
Undergraduates) activity
• Attract undergraduates who will apply to our graduate program • Further broader participation of (under-represented groups)
• Department supports core mentoring and management structure for
faculty and department REU
n Agreements with leading international universities • Enhance faculty research
• Send students to our undergraduate and graduate programs including
REU as stepping stone
n Establish new curriculum development activities working with
Associate Deans for undergraduate and graduate education
• Fund faculty time developing new innovative courses
Department wide Activities II
n
Working with the Associate Dean for research, I would
use my experience to
support faculty
interested in
increasing
research
funding
• Link with appropriate collaborators within and outside
school that will enable more competitive proposals.
n
Develop more
distance education
activities both to
other campuses and across the globe
• Build on successful Cheminformatics classes • Exploit UITS technology
• Department provides support for faculty driven activities
n
Prepare proposals for
department wide Broadening
Teaching Loads
n
There are substantial
faculty concerns
about the size
and fairness of
teaching loads
• A detailed plan here requires knowledge about budgets and
operational constraints for department and I do not have this
n
Produce a
high priority plan
that would address:
n
Clarification of
buy out
of courses using research funds
to pay faculty salary
n
Increase of
curriculum development funding
to allow
buy outs in education as well as research
n
Hire more
lecturers
as long as one can maintain
course
quality
n
Reduce number
of courses offered.
Graduate Students
n Need very vigorous effort to recruit PhD students of highest
quality
• Department initiatives in areas of REU, Broadening Participation and
International agreements will be helpful.
n Recruit the highest ranked (say top 10) students with very
attractive offers.
• Overall admit students that match faculty interests
• Use multiple criteria to identify highest ranked students • Work with school wide group led by David Leake
• Increase US Citizens
n Extend video conferencing based interviews of foreign students • Research and Teaching potential
n Review the PhD program and optimize the requirements for the
different parts of department
• Some might benefit from an increased research and decreased course load
“Informatics the Program”
n
Expand informatics activities outside the core interests
of current faculty by appropriate
multidisciplinary
collaborations
with other parts of Indiana University
• Work with UITS, COAS, SLIS and Business schooln
Business informatics
is particularly valuable given our
undergraduates’ interest in this
n
Astronomy
and
Geography
Informatics are obvious
Particular Discipline Initiatives I
n Life Sciences: Bioinformatics has young group of faculty who
have done very well.
• Raise national visibility
• Increase number of PhD students
• Continue search for a senior hire in Bioinformatics.
n Life Sciences: Cheminformatics program has already achieved
national reputation in a much smaller peer group but small size makes “business model” unclear
• Visiting committee can help
• Combine some management functions and curricula between
Bioinformatics and Cheminformatics
• Preserve Bioinformatics/Cheminformatics labels to attract the best
students and national attention
n Complex Systems: Here we need to build on successes and
address key loss of talented faculty member
• Opportunity for university wide leadership
Particular Discipline Initiatives II
n
Technology:
Marshal resources to attract a leader for
security
.
• Security package could involve both the senior hire and the
possibility of a further junior appointment.
• The visiting committee could help guide our strategy here.
n
Human centered Informatics:
I need to
get educated
about the fields of Social Informatics, Music
Informatics and HCI.
• Marshal resources to make a senior appointment that will
work with existing faculty to create a synergistic group with perhaps the help of an additional junior appointment.
• Proposed department wide initiatives to encourage both
Career and Qualifications I
n I have been involved in multidisciplinary research for much of
my career http://www.infomall.org/gcf/gcfcv_December07.doc
starting with my first paper in crystallography in 1966
n The Caltech Concurrent Computation Program established by
me around 1983 was an early version of “Grand Challenges”
linking computer science to applications
• http://www.old-npac.org/copywrite/pcw/ is online copy of book
n I have run a research group with an annual budget, mostly
federally funded, of $2-$5 million since 1983. Before that I had an active physics research group funded by DoE with a budget of about $250K per year.
• My physics work was always computer-oriented involving substantial
model building and data analysis at interface of theory and experiment.
n I have experience with DoE, DoD, NASA, NIH, NSF (many
Career and Qualifications II
n I have over 550 published papers and supervised 57 PhD students in
mainly Computer Science and Physics but also Electrical Engineering,
Computer Engineering and Computation and Neural Systems (CNS at Caltech of which I was co-founder)
n My core expertise is mathematics which was my undergraduate major
• I was top in Cambridge my year 1964 being Senior Wrangler and
winning Mayhew prize (defined in Wikipedia)
n My PhD was in Physics in 1967 (my 23rd birthday) and I switched from
“computing in physics” to computer science 1983-1990
n Currently I work on Earthquake Science (not looking at magnitudes <
6.5 in Indiana), Polar Science, Particle Physics, Plasma Physics, Digital Libraries (with Smithsonian National Museum for American Indian),
Command and Control/Emergency Management, and
Cheminformatics extending to Bioinformatics
n My current core computer science work is in Grids/Clouds/Web 2.0
and multicore with a focus on practical applications as listed above
Career and Qualifications III
n I was chair of Caltech Physics department from 1981-1983 (ranked number 1)
• I led Caltech Computing Organization 1983-1988 deploying networks and PC’s to
undergraduates
• In physics my major administrative achievements were in graduate student
recruitment and faculty hires
n My best known research (parallel computing) was done while I held these
administrative positions
n I have always been interested in distance education
• Teaching many classes to Jackson State University from 1997-2005
n I also work extensively with minority serving institutions and have four
active grants in that area.
n At Syracuse University, I set up their computational science undergraduate
and graduate education program
• I taught the Saturday morning “Java for Kids” program http://w
ww.old-npac.org/projects/k12javaspring99/ using distance education
• Developed several web-based education projects with Physics and School of
