Short Biography

Leila De Floriani is a full professor at the University of Maryland at College Park. Previously, she was a full professor at the University of Genova, Italy, since 1991, and held positions at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Nebraska, and the Italian National Research Council. She was the 2020 IEEE Computer Society (CS) President. She currently serves as the IEEE CS Past President and as chair of the IEEE CS Diversity and Inclusion Committee. She is also a member of the IEEE Conferences and of the IEEE Conference Publications Committees.

She served for two terms (2015-2018) as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. She is currently an associate editor of several top journals in the field. She serves and has served on the committees of over 150 international conferences, including many IEEE conferences, contributing to several of them in a leadership capacity.

De Floriani is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), a Fellow of the Eurographics Association, Solid Modeling Association Pioneer and an inducted member of the IEEE Visualization Academy. She is an IEEE Computer Society Golden Core Member and a member of the IEEE Honor Society IEEE-HKN.

She has authored over 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications in data visualization, spatial data representation and processing, computer graphics, geometric modeling, shape analysis and understanding, garnering several best paper awards and invitations as a keynote speaker. Her research has been funded by numerous U.S., Italian and international agencies, including the European Commission, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Italian National Research Council.

Please visit my academic webpage for more information on research, teaching and professional activities.

IEEE is a global leader in science, engineering, and technology with a mission to serve both researchers and practitioners. In the post-Covid era, I believe that we need to respond to new challenges, by making them opportunities for growth:

• Enhance inclusiveness by promoting membership diversity through outreach activities and involvement of underrepresented groups as volunteers in publications, conferences, and governance.
• Define new strategies for engaging the IEEE community, through personalized benefits, specifically focusing on younger generations.
• Lead in open science and open access, changing the business model for journal and conference publications and expanding services offered.
• Develop sustainable financial models for hybrid conferences to provide unprecedented opportunities for geographic expansion in attendance and increasing gender diversity.
• Engage on a worldwide basis researchers and practitioners in emerging areas of science, engineering and technology.

I believe I am uniquely positioned to contribute effectively to the continued growth of the IEEE. If elected, I will draw on my professional background and experience as 2020 Computer Society President to address these challenges.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed on this website are the opinions of the author and not necessarily the opinions of the IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society of the University of Maryland.

I served as President of the Computer Society (CS) in 2020, which was a year of unprecedented challenges and transformative changes, yet also a year filled with great and numerous accomplishments, namely:

• Financial sustainability. Despite the ongoing difficult worldwide economic situation, financial sustainability goals have been highly surpassed in 2020, generating a record-breaking surplus for the 2020 budget; and nearly doubling its reserves.

• Promoting greater diversity and Inclusionl. A very important goal of my presidency was to identify ways to expand diversity and inclusion in all areas of the Society activities and in the communities served. Thus, we created a permanent Computer Society Committee on Diversity and Inclusion (D&I), that I am currently chairing, to coordinate, expand and promote D&I activities in the CS, as well as a dedicated fund in the IEEE Foundation to support them.

• New D&I activities. Under my leadership, we created a new interview series, Women in STEM, featuring several prominent female scientists and professionals in the computing field, to encourage early- and mid-career women to pursue leadership roles. Best practices for conferences and publications were developed, as well as a roadmap to encourage the use of unbiased, and culturally sensitive language in journal and conference articles, and other Society products. Other achievements include an increase of the female presence in leadership positions inside the Society, an enhanced collaboration with Women in Engineering, and a new oral history project celebrating diversity in computing.

• An enhancement of the Society governance to improve volunteer participation and streamline the decision process. This has been achieved through the enlargement of the Board of Governors with participation of representatives of editors-in-chief and Technical Committee chairs, so as to increase bottom-up engagement of our volunteers in decision-making and policy development, and through the operational simplification of CS program boards, by reducing the number of subcommittees, and, in general, the length of decision processes.

• Expanding and consolidating the publication portfolio. We started a gold-level open access publication, the Open Journal of the Computer Society (OJ-CS), and the IEEE Transactions on Artificial intelligence, co-sponsored with three other IEEE Societies. In both cases, 2020 data suggests that they will be leaders in their technical fields. The Society made also an extraordinary investment in 2020 in substantially expanding the number of allocated pages to its publications so as to considerably reduce the publication queue.

• A renovated effort on open science and reproducibility. The CS is very active in this area through pilot cases in conferences and transactions. Through an ad hoc committee that I formed in 2020, we conducted a survey of reproducibility activities in the CS and in the IEEE, developed a roadmap for professional societies, including case studies, tools and sustainable revenue models, presented in a webinar and in an upcoming publication.

• A successful transition to virtual conferences. I have led the Computer Society in helping conference organizers to quickly pivot conferences to all-virtual events, identifying best practices and case studies, developing tools and training webinars. This has been a monumental effort by the CS staff and volunteers, which led to a large increase in conference attendance, as well as to an impressive expansion in geographic and gender diversity of the audience.

• Delivering member value and improving satisfaction. We established a multilingual translation program to fully engage with non-English-speaking members, which led in 2020 to the translation of highly visited pages on the CS web site in Chinese and Spanish. A new member recognition program was designed, started in 2021 for the 75th anniversary of the Computer Society, which focuses on recognizing CS members for their technical contributions.

• Enhancing industry engagement. We started an Industry Engagement Committee in 2020 focused on recommending policies to increase industry engagement and promoting CS activities to industry. In this context, the IEEE InTech Forum, a brand new conference targeted at industry, was launched in 2020, which was offered virtually and focused on critical technologies and research developed in response to Covid-19.

My service as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graohics (TVCG), the top journal in visualization, virtual reality and computer graphics, has led to relevant improvements in several quantitative and qualitative metrics of TVCG, with almost doubling its impact factor and with a considerable increase in the number of submissions and downloads. During my tenure as TVCG editor-in-chief:

• I have developed and experimented a new model of close collaboration between journals and conferences which represents a dramatic change in journal-conferences interactions, and builds on the strengths of these publication modes, in which conference presentations are fundamental for visibility and dissemination while journal publications are directed to archival purposes. This model had a positive effect on both TVCG metrics and on conference participation: for instance, half of the papers presented at IEEE Visualization in 2018 have been TVCG regular papers.

• I started one of the two pilot projects inside the Computer Society in research reproducibility, participating in the Computer Graphics community replicability initiative, enhancing the papers published in the Society Digital Library with their reproducible code and data.

• I have expanded and consolidated TVCG presence in the fast growing areas of visual analytics, of virtual and augmented reality, also with a renovated scope and an extensive reorganization of the editorial journal structure, thereby ensuring a continuing and expanded leadership of IEEE in these highly strategic areas of computing.

2020 President, IEEE Computer Society

IEEE and IEEE Computer Society Committees and Boards

• Member, IEEE Conferences Committee, 2021-2023.
• Member, IEEE Conference Publications Committee, 2021.
• Member, IEEE Conference Diversity Best Practices Ad-Hoc Committee, 2021.
• Member, IEEE Conference Open Access Ad-Hoc Committee, 2021.
• Member, IEEE Technical Activities Board, 2020.
• Founding Chair, IEEE Computer Society Diversity and Inclusion Committee, 2021.
• Chair, IEEE Computer Society Intersociety Cooperation Committee, 2021.
• Chair, IEEE Computer Society Nominations Committee, 2021.
• IEEE Computer Society Liaison, Computing Research Association Board, since 2020.
• Chair, IEEE Computer Society Diversity and Inclusion Task Force, 2020.
• Chair, IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors, 2020.
• Chair, IEEE Computer Society Executive Committee, 2020.
• Chair, IEEE Computer Society Constitution and Bylaws Committee, 2019.
• Chair, IEEE Computer Society Executive Committee, 2020.
• Member, IEEE USA Research and Development Policy Committee, 2020.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors, since 2017.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Intersociety Cooperation Committee, since 2019.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Finance Committee, since 2019.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Nominations Committee, 2019.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Executive Committee, since 2019.
• Chair, IEEE Computer Society Audit Committee, 2018.
• Vice-Chair, IEEE Computer Society Fellow Evaluation Committee, 2017-2018.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Constitution and Bylaws Committee, since 2018.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Audit Committee, 2017.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors, since 2017.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Transactions Operations Committee, 2015-2018.
• Member, (non-voting), IEEE Computer Science Publication Board, 2015-2018.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Fellow Evaluation Committee, 2016.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Ad-hoc Growth Committee, 2018.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics Editor-in-Chief Search Committee, 2018.
• Member, Executive Committee, IEEE Computer Society Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC), 2015-2018.

IEEE Editorial Boards

• Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), 2015-2018
• Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2004-2008

IEEE Conferences

• Program Committee Member, IEEE Visweek 2021, October 24-29, 2021.
• Advisory Committee Member, IEEE WIE Returning Mother Conference, 2021.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE Visweek 2020, October 25-30, 2020.
• Chair, IEEE Visualization - SciVis, Best Paper Award Committee, 2019.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE Visweek 2019, Vancouver, October 20-25, 2019.
• Program Committee Member, Joint IEEE/ Eurographics Conference on Visualization, Leipzig, June 17-21, 2013.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE Visweek 2012, Seattle, October 14-19, 2012
• Program Committee Member, IEEE Visweek 2011, Providence, October 23-28, 2011
• Program Committee Member, IEEE Visweek 2010, Salt Lake City, October 24-29, 2010
• Program Committee Member, IEEE International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications, Aix-en-Provence, June 21-23, 2010.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications, Beijing, June 26-28, 2009.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE Conference on 3D Data Processing and Transmission, 2008
• Program Committee Member, IEEE International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications, Boston, June 4-6, 2008.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE Visualization 2007, Sacramento, October 28- November 1, 2007.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE International Conference on Shape Modeling and Applications, Matsushima, June 14-16, 2006.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE Visualization 2003, Seattle, October 19-24, 2003.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE Visualization 2002, San Diego, October 27- November 1, 2002.
• Program Committee Member, Joint Eurographics/ IEEE Symposium on Visualization, 2002.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE Visualization 2001, San Diego, October 21-26, 2001.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE Visualization 2000, Salt Lake City, October 8-13, 2000.
• Program Committee Member, IEEE Visualization 1999, San Francisco, October 24-29, 1999.

Please see my academic home page for a complete list of my editorial and conference activities.

Memberships

• Fellow, IEEE
• Member, IEEE Computer Society
• Member, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society
• Member, IEEE Women in Engineering
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee.
• Member, IEEE Computer Society Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Technical Committee.

I have a broad scientific background in computing, specifically in visual and spatial computing, also recognized with the elevation to IEEE Fellow, IAPR Fellow, Eurographics Association Fellow, with the induction in the IEEE Visualization Academy and in the IEEE Honor Society Eta Kappa Nu, and with the recognition as Solid Modeling Pioneer.

Over my career, I have held positions in academic and government institutions in both Europe and the United States. This experience has provided me with an in-depth knowledge of research and educational settings in these regions as well as an understanding of the different needs of researchers in academia and research institutions. My long-standing research collaborations with top Asian scientists in graphics and visualization, and my experience as editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) have further enriched my knowledge and exposure to academic institutions and industry in Asia.

I have been highly involved in graduate education as the Ph.D. program director (at the University of Genova), as graduate committee chair (at the University of Maryland), and as advisor for more than 25 Ph.D. students and a number of postdocs at both institutions. Many of my former students have academic positions, at Universities or research institutions in Europe and in the U.S., and I have been the privilege of being the advisor of some of the most prominent Italian scientists in the area of visual and spatial computing. I also started the first curriculum in visual computing within Computer Science undergraduate and graduate curricula in Italy. My foundational contribution in establishing a community in Geometry and Graphics in Italy has been recognized in the elevation to Eurographics Fellow.

My research activity is in the areas of data visualization, spatial data processing, data analysis and topology-based learning, computer vision and shape analysis, areas which are not widely represented at IEEE volunteer level. The major contributions of my research over the years have been in network representation and analysis, feature-based modeling and analysis for design and manufacturing, hierarchical terrain modeling and visibility terrain analysis, level-of-detail modeling and visualization of 3D shapes and volume data, spatial and combinatorial mesh data structures, and shape and data analysis based on combinatorial topology.

I have published over 300 articles in international peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and book chapters, including widely-cited papers on level-of-detail shape modeling, on topology-based shape analysis and on geospatial data representation and processing. I have authored and co-authored several influential survey papers on hierarchical terrain modeling, terrain visibility, multi-resolution geometric modeling, geospatial algorithms and data structures, and topological data analysis and visualization. Please see my academic website for a list of my publications.

In addition to serving as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE TVCG for two terms (2015-2018), I was an associate editor of the same publication from 2004 to 2008. I am currently serving as the associate editor of: ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems (since 2013), Computers & Graphics (since 2020), GeoInformatica (since 2004), Graphical Models (since 2010), Computer Science Review (since 2021), International Journal of Spatial Information Science (since 2014), and International Journal of Geo-Information (since 2019). Formerly, I was a member of the editorial board of the International of Journal of Geographic Information Systems, and of Computer-Aided Design.

I served on the program committees (over 150) of the most prestigious conferences in the fields of geometric and solid modeling, visualization, computer graphics, image analysis, and geospatial data science, with different roles, and on several conferences in a leadership position. Please see my academic home page for a complete list of my conference activities.

My research has been funded by numerous national and international agencies. I am and have been the principal investigator in numerous research projects funded by the US National Science Foundation, by the European Commission (EC), by the Italian National Research Council, by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, by NATO and NOAA, including the EC training networks MINGLE and SPACENET, the EC network of excellence AIM@SHAPE. I served as the principal investigator and coordinator of Italian national projects, representing major efforts in creating and expanding communities in graphics, visualization and spatial data science.

• Fellow, International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) for contributions to geometric modeling and image analysis, 1998.

• Fellow, IEEE for contributions to geometric modeling and scientific visualization, 2016.

• Recipient, Solid Modeling Pioneer Award for seminal work in solid and feature-based modeling, 2017.

• Recipient, IEEE Computer Society Golden Medal Award, 2018.

• Inducted Member, IEEE Honor Society IEEE-HKN for excellence in education and meritorious work in geometric modeling and scientific visualization, 2019.

• Fellow, Eurographics Association, for outstanding contributions, leadership and service to the fields of Computer Graphics, Visualization and to the Eurographics Association in particular, and for foundational contribution to starting up one of the most vital research communities in Geometry and Graphics in Italy, 2020.

• Inducted Member, IEEE Visualization Academy, 2020.

• Best paper awards at Shape Modeling International (2015), IEEE/EG Symposium on Volume and Point-Based Graphics (2008), ACM SIGSPATIAL (2008); best paper runner up at ACM SIGSPATIAL 2020.

• R. Fellegara, K. Weiss, L. De Floriani, The Stellar Tree: a Compact Representation for Simplicial Complexes and Beyond, Computers & Graphics, 2021, in print.

• L. De Floriani, 2020: A Year of Transformative Change and Conquering Adversity, IEEE Computer, 54, 2, 2021.

• R. Fellegara, L. De Floriani, P. Magillo, K. Weiss, Tetrahedral Trees: A Family of Hierarchical Spatial Indexes for Tetrahedral Meshes, ACM Trans. Spatial Algorithms and Systems. 6, 4, 2020.

• S.Scaramuccia, F. Iuricich, L. De Floriani, C. Landi, Computing Multiparameter Persistent Homology through a Discrete Morse-based Approach, Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, 89, August 2020.

• L. De Floriani, 2020: A Journey of Discovery, Challenges, and Opportunity, IEEE Computer, 53, 9, 2020.

• R. Fellegara, F. Iuricich, L. De Floriani, U. Fugacci, Efficient Homology-Preserving Simplification of High-Dimensional Simplicial Shapes, Computer Graphics Forum, 39, 1, February 2020.

• X. Xu, F. Iuricich, L. De Floriani, A Persistence-Based Approach for Individual Tree Mapping, Proceedings 28th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, November 2020..

• U. Fugacci, F. Iuricich, L. De Floriani, Computing Discrete Morse Complexes on Simplicial complexes, Graphical Models,109, 2019.

• H. Wei, R. Fellegara, L. De Floriani, H. Samet, Multi-Level Filtering to Retrieve Similar Trajectories under the Frechet Distance, Proceedings 26th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, November 2018.

• F. Iuricich, L. De Floriani, Hierarchical Forman Triangulation: a Multiscale Model for Scalar Field Analysis, Computers & Graphics, 66, 113-123, 2017.

• R. Fellegara, F. Iuricich, L. De Floriani, Efficient Representation and Analysis of Triangulated Terrains, Proceedings 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems, 74:1-74:4, 2017.

• L. Comic, L. De Floriani, F. Iuricich, P.Magillo, Computing a Discrete Morse Gradient from a Watershed Decomposition, Computers & Graphics 58: 43-52, 2016.

• C. Heine, H. Leitte, M. Hlawitschka, F. Iuricich, L. De Floriani, G. Scheuermann, H. Hagen, C. Garth, A Survey of Topology-based Methods in Visualization. Computer Graphics Forum, 35(3): 643-667, 2016.

• F. Iuricich, S. Scaramuccia, C. Landi, L. De Floriani, A Discrete Morse-based Approach to Multivariate Data Analysis, Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH ASIA Symposium on Visualization, Macau, December 6-7, 2016.

• L. De Floriani, U. Fugacci, F. Iuricich: Homological Shape Analysis Through Discrete Morse Theory. Perspectives in Shape Analysis, Springer International Publishing, 187-209, 2016.

• L. De Floriani, U. Fugacci, F. Iuricich, P. Magillo, Morse Complexes for Shape Segmentation and Homological Analysis: Discrete Models and Algorithms, Computer Graphics Forum 34(2), 761-785, 2015.

• F. Iuricich, U. Fugacci, L. De Floriani, Topologically-consistent Simplification of Discrete Morse Complexes, Computers & Graphics, 34:157-166, 2015.

• L. Comic, L.De Floriani, P.Magillo, F. Iuricich, Morphological Modeling of Terrains and Volume Data, Springer Verlag, 2014.

• P. D. Simari, G. Picciau, L. De Floriani, Fast and Scalable Mesh Superfacets, Computer. Graphics Forum, 33(7), 181-190, 2014.

• L. Comic, L. De Floriani, F. Iuricich, U. Fugacci, Topological Modifications and Hierarchical Representation of Cell Complexes in Arbitrary Dimensions, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, 121, 2-12, 2014.

Please see my academic website for a complete list of my publications.