Short Bio

Isabel F. Cruz is Professor of Computer Science in the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She holds a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. She has received numerous awards for teaching, service, and research including the NSF Career Award and recently the University of Illinois Faculty Scholar Award (2011-2014). She has more than 110 refereed publications in databases, geographic information systems, semantic web, visual languages, graph drawing, user interfaces, multimedia, information retrieval, and security. The broader impact of her research has been demonstrated in several real-world scenarios, including biomedical and geospatial interdisciplinary applications, and in many teaching innovations. The AgreementMaker system has been one of the world leading ontology matching systems in the last few years.

She has been general chair, program committee chair or program committee vice/associate chair of several of the most important conferences in her fields of expertise, such as IEEE ICDE, ACM GIS, International Conference on GeoSpatial Semantics, ACM Multimedia, ISWC, and ESWC and served on the program committees of more than 170 conferences. She has been editor to several books and journals and has served in strategic planning committees including the Mapping Science Committee of the National Academies.

She directs the Advances in Data, Visual, and Information Science (ADVIS) Lab, has graduated twenty students in their PhD and MS theses, and has published with fifteen of her undergraduate research advisees. Her leadership roles at UIC include being the Head Facilitator for the NSF Advance WISEST program (to increase the number, participation and leadership status of women in academic science and engineering). Other leadership roles at UIC include being chair of the CS faculty search committee, member of the dean of engineering search committee twice, member of the College of Engineering executive committee, and member of the Provost's Sustainability Strategic Thinking Advisory Committee (SSTAC) since its inception (Fall 2012).