Shih-Fu Chang and Jeannette Wing Elected to the NAI

Shih-Fu Chang and Jeannette Wing, both members of Columbia University Asian Faculty Association (CUAFA), have been elected to the National Academy of Inventors for their “highly prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and welfare of society.” They join a cohort of 169 distinguished inventors to be NAI Fellows, the highest professional distinction awarded to academic inventors. The 2022 Fellow class hails from 110 research universities, governmental, and non-profit research institutions worldwide. They collectively hold over 5,000 issued U.S. patents.

Shih-Fu Chang

Shih-Fu Chang is the dean of Columbia Engineering, where he leads the School’s education, research, and innovation mission and execution of its strategic vision, Engineering for Humanity. He has greatly contributed to the growth and advancement of the School, propelling it to be one of the top engineering programs in the nation.Chang is the Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor with appointments in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science. As one of the most influential experts in multimedia, computer vision, and artificial intelligence, his research has led to spin-off companies and licensed technologies in multimedia search and recognition. The image search tools developed by his group have been used by major media companies in content management and law enforcement agencies in fighting online human trafficking crimes. He has launched AI tools for online disinformation detection and attribution.Chang is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and IEEE, and an elected member of Academia Sinica. He received the Kiyo Tomiyasu Award from IEEE in 2009 and the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates in 2013. He is also the inaugural director for the Columbia Center of AI Technology in collaboration with Amazon. He received his BS from National Taiwan University in 1985 and his PhD from the University of California-Berkeley in 1993. He also holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam.

Jeannette M. Wing

Jeannette M. Wing is the executive vice president for research at Columbia University and professor of computer science. She joined Columbia in 2017 as the inaugural Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute. Prior to Columbia, Wing was corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, served on the faculty and as department head in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, and served as assistant director for computer and information science and engineering at the National Science Foundation.Her current research focus is on trustworthy AI. Her general research interests are in the areas of trustworthy computing, security and privacy, specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. She is known for her work on linearizability, behavioral subtyping, attack graphs, and privacy-compliance checkers. Her 2006 seminal essay, titled "Computational Thinking," is credited with helping to establish the centrality of computer science to problem-solving in fields where previously it had not been embraced.Wing is widely recognized for her intellectual leadership in computer science, and more recently in data science. She has been recognized with distinguished service awards from the Computing Research Association and the Association for Computing Machinery. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. She is also a member of the American Academy for Arts and Sciences Board of Directors and Council; the New York State Commission on Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Automation; and the Advisory Board for the Association for Women in Mathematics. Wing holds bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from MIT, and an honorary doctorate of technology from Linkoping University, Sweden.Read More