Candidate for 2024 President
IEEE Computer Society

University of Oklahoma:

- Gallogy Chair Professor of Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Professor of Computer Science

- Associate Vice President of Research and Partnerships

- Director, Data Institute for Societal Challenges

IEEE Fellow

Director, Visual Analytics for Command, Control, and Interoperability Environments

Position Statement

Now, more than ever, the Computer Society must be a leader who connects and provides opportunities, continuing education, and valuable resources to our members, as well as providing innovative technology solutions to global challenges. We need to harness our membership’s world-class expertise and innovation to provide international IT leadership, guidance, and direction. We need this expertise to help deploy and deliver new technology driven solutions to these challenges by partnering with other professional societies, companies, and government agencies across the globe. Through these partnerships and coalitions, we can drive innovation, deliver impact, and help solve international problems and mitigate crises.

We must maintain our core values and highest quality of our products and services, while innovating to provide leading education, products, standards, services, and opportunities to our worldwide membership: students, working professionals, researchers, and educators. While I have been on the Board of Governors, we started this process by introducing new products, improving member engagement, and strategically focusing our products and services, while streamlining our operations. We need to now target strategic growth to increase diversity and inclusivity, and continue innovation and member service based on our experiences in new models for publication, conferences, communication, and community building. New hybrid conference models have increased the diversity, inclusivity, and participation in our conferences and we have to harness this experience in revising our services to continue this growth. We have financial solvency to enable us to be more proactive in engaging a larger core of our membership and be flexible, responsive, and innovative in our offerings.

If elected, I will champion the development of new models for hybrid conferences, publications, member engagement and leadership, and on-line communities, while continuing to actively engage young professionals world-wide as active Society volunteers to provide creative and responsive ideas, products, and services for our membership. These innovative models also enable us to be more inclusive and foster diversity. Our goal must be to provide innovation, service, inclusivity, and value to our diverse membership throughout their careers.

Our members and volunteers are our greatest assets and we must strategically engage them in our society transformation and empower a team of volunteers to passionately share our mission and vision to make the Computer Society an innovation and change leader within IEEE and our world.

I look forward to receiving your input to help us make the Computer Society of value to you and providing service and value to all our members and our communities.

Some specific opportunities that I look forward to working with our members to achieve include the following:

• Exploring new opportunities to grow input and guidance of members throughout our organizations, working with and strengthening our chapters across the globe.

• Developing new products that are of value to professionals, students, and researchers from publications on new directions in computing and its applications, to new resources for students and professionals throughout their career.

• Integrating our activities across conferences, standards, publication, education, membership and geographical activities to provide the most beneficial, unified member products and services.

• Guiding the shaping of the future of Computer Society digital products, publications and offerings, and increasing their timeliness to get the latest research and application information into the community as soon as possible.

• Increasing availability, equity, and inclusivity of our events, products, and services to all members of our community. We have seen a growth in diversity, inclusivity, and student involvement in our new conference models through providing virtual and hybrid conferences and we have to continue these efforts and learn from them to increase DEI in all our efforts.

IEEE Computer Society President Elect Candidate Town Hall

If you missed our discussion with great questions from members and live viewers, you can see the video here at the election town hall page.   

Slides from my presentation can be found here.

New Initiatives and Policies I proposed:

• Create a mentorship program that connects young professions to senior members and also grows the bridge between academia and industry.

• Enable interaction through partnerships and hybrid options 

• Pubs – Conference partnerships provide more interaction and face to face meeting. For example, create best practices and partner templates based upon the IEEE TVCG partnership with IEEE VIS, IEEE VR, and ACM SIGGRAPH.

• Create affordable, effective tools for hybrid conferences and ensure conferences offer a hybrid experience to grow diversity, equity, and inclusivity. 

  • For instance,  build upon IEEE VIS 2022 that combines commercial and volunteer-developed tools. 

• Create best practices for hybrid conferences with satellite locations engaging chapters. 

• Expand Computer Society initial hybrid conference tools, e.g., RDMobile.

• Have monthly or quarterly townhalls with the Computer Society Executive Committee to increase communication and discussion with our members. 

• Adress societal grand challenges by Innovating, Partnering, Disseminating, Coordinating

  • Create & expand opportunities to disseminate research knowledge more broadly in relevant targeted areas by providing free access to publications in these areas.

  • Promote, encourage, and fund special sessions at conferences and special issues of publications on these topics.

  • Create new targeted forums on these topics through working with our members and communities – e.g., chapters, TCs, STCs.

  • Promote more joint societal efforts in these areas to connect our members with practitioners and researchers in these targeted areas. For example, partnerships with the American Meteorological Society, the International Society for Disease Surveillance, the International Society for Crisis Response and Management, and the CRA Computing Community Consortium – Workshop on Computing and Sustainable Agriculture.

I look forward to helping grow the Computer Society’s service and impact and need YOU as part of our team to succeed!

Further information is available on the pages on this site and by emailing me.