2022 CRA Board of Directors Election Results and New Board Members
CRA members have elected three new members to its Board of Directors: Maria Gini, Gillian Hayes and Ben Zorn. Lorrie Cranor, Divesh Srivastava and Jaime Teevan were re-elected to the CRA Board. All of their terms run from July 1, 2022 through June 30, 2025. CRA would like to thank everyone who agreed to run for a position on the board this year. Retiring from the board as of June 30, are Penny Rheingans, Shashi Shekhar, and Marvin Theimer.
There are also changes to the appointed members to the board, who are not elected. Yolanda Gil has been appointed the new AAAI representative, replacing Charles Isbell. Beginning July 1, Dan Lopresti will replace Liz Bradley as the CCC Chair and representative on the CRA Board.
CRA would like to thank all retiring board members for contributions during their service on the board.
Yolanda Gil
Yolanda Gil is Principal Scientist and Senior Director for Strategic Initiatives in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, Director of AI and Data Science Initiatives in the Viterbi School of Engineering, and Research Professor in Computer Science and in Spatial Sciences. She received her M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, with a focus on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Gil collaborates with scientists in many domains on semantic workflows and metadata capture, provenance and trust, social knowledge collection, computer-mediated collaboration, and automated discovery. In 2019, she co-chaired the CRA/AAAI 20-Year Artificial Intelligence Research Roadmap for the US with key strategic recommendations based on extensive community engagement. She initiated and led the W3C Provenance Group that resulted in a widely-used standard that provides the foundations for trust on the Web. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She is also Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and served as its 24th President.
Maria Gini
Maria Gini received a degree in physics from the University of Milan in 1972. From 1974-1979, she was a Research Associate and from 1980-1982 a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Electronics in Politecnico of Milano in Italy. She then joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota in 1982 as an Assistant Professor. She became the first woman to join the department. While there, she was promoted to Associate Professor in 1988 and to Professor in 1997. In 2001, Gini received the Distinguished Women Scholars Award from the University of Minnesota.
Since 2005, she has also been Associate Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. She was named an AAAI fellow in 2008 “for significant contributions to coordination and competition in multirobot and multiagent systems, for leadership in the AI community, and for inspiring the next generation”. In 2011, she received the Mullen-Spector-Truax Women’s Leadership Award from the University of Minnesota, presented annually to “a faculty or staff woman at the University who has made outstanding contributions to women’s leadership development”. Gini was also named an IEEE fellow in 2018. As of 2019, she has graduated 34 Ph.D. students as well as nearly 100 graduate students.
Gillian Hayes
Gillian R. Hayes is Vice Provost for Graduate Education and Dean of the Graduate Division at UC Irvine. She is also the Robert A. and Barbara L. Kleist Professor of Informatics in the School of Information and Computer Sciences with courtesy appointments in computer science, education, and pediatrics. As dean of the Graduate Division, Dr. Hayes leads campus efforts to recruit a dynamic, diverse, and excellent set of graduate students and post-doctoral scholars, ensure their ability to thrive as scholars at UCI, and help them launch their careers. Her research interests are in human-computer interaction, assistive and educational technologies, and health informatics. She designs, develops, deploys, and evaluates technologies to empower people to use collected data to address real human needs in sensitive and ethically responsible ways.
Dan Lopresti
Daniel Lopresti received his bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton in 1987. In 2003, he joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh where his research examines fundamental algorithmic and systems-related questions in pattern recognition, bioinformatics, and security. On July 1, 2009, he became Chair of the CSE Department and occupied the position for 10 years through several reappointments ending on June 30, 2019. Beginning on July 1, 2014, he served as Interim Dean of the P. C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science for a year. On July 1, 2015, he was named Director of the Data X strategic initiative, a role he held until June 2020.
Lopresti currently serves as the President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR). He is also currently the Vice Chair of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC). He is an Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), and as an Area Editor for Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU). He has co-authored over 150 peer-reviewed publications, and is a named co-inventor on 24 U.S. patents. Over his career, Lopresti has mentored more than 70 undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs, and personally facilitated professional networking connections for hundreds more.
Ben Zorn
Ben Zorn is a Partner Researcher and former co-manager of the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group in Microsoft Research, Redmond WA working on programming languages and software engineering. His research interests include usability, security, and reliability, including reliability of artificial intelligence.
From 1990-1998, he was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado. He has a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1982) and an MS (1984) and Ph.D. (1989) from the University of California at Berkeley.
He has served as the Program Chair (1999) and General Chair (2010) of PLDI, on the Executive Committee of SIGPLAN, and as a member of the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council between 2014 and 2020. He co-founded the CRA-Industry committee in 2021 and is currently co-chair. In 2021, he received the SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award.
