Leila De Floriani

Professor

University of Maryland

Biography

Leila De Floriani is a professor at the University of Maryland at College Park. She has previously been a professor at the University of Genova (Italy), since 1990, where she developed the first undergraduate and graduate curricula in computer graphics in Italy, and served as Director of the Ph.D. program in Computer Science for eight years. During her career, she has also held positions at the University of Nebraska, at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and at the Italian National Research Council.

She is a Fellow of IEEE, a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), a Fellow of the Eurographics Association, a Pioneer of the Solid Modeling Association and an inducted member of the IEEE Visualization Academy. She is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Golden Core award and she is an inducted member of the IEEE Honor Society IEEE Eta Kappa Nu.

De Floriani was the 2020 President of the IEEE Computer Society. She is the IEEE Division VIII Director for 2023-24, and a member of the IEEE Board of Directors and of the IEEE Assembly. She is the founding Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Diversity and Inclusion Committee. Among the other involvements, she has been a member of the IEEE Conferences Committee (2021-23), and of the IEEE Publication Services and Products Board (2023). She also has been a member of the Computing Research Association (CRA) Board in 2020-23. She is currently a member of the Scientific Council of the Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation (ISSNAF).

De Floriani has been the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) in 2015-2018, and served as an associate editor for IEEE TVCG from 2004 to 2008. De Floriani is currently an editor of the ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems, Computers & Graphics, Computer Science Review, GeoInformatica, Graphical Models, and International Journal of Spatial Information Science. She has served on the program committees of over 150 leading international conferences, contributing in several of them in a leadership capacity.

She has authored over 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications in data visualization, spatial data science, 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 national and international agencies, including the European Commission, the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Leila De Floriani is the team leader of the UMD GeoVis group: see the GeoVis group website (https://geovis.umiacs.io/) for information about the group members, research and activities.

Contacts

deflo(at)umd.edu

(301) 405-4391 or (301) 405-6584

Awards & Recognitions

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.
Member, Scientific Council, Italian Scientists and Scholars in North America Foundation (ISSNAF).
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.

IEEE Accomplishments & Activities

Major IEEE Accomplishments

Member and volunteer engagement. As President of the IEEE Computer Society (CS), I developed: a novel recognition program to honor society members' technical contributions; a multilingual website’s translation project to fully engage with non-English-speaking members, which led in 2020 to the translation of highly visited pages on the CS website in Chinese and Spanish; a volunteer satisfaction assessment initiative targeted to editors-in-chief, associated editors and technical committee chairs. To enhance industry engagement, the IEEE InTech Forum, a new conference targeted at industry, was launched in 2020. It focused on critical technologies and research developed in response to COVID-19, featuring keynote and invited talks by very prominent industry leaders.
Focus on technical quality. As editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG), I doubled the journal impact factor, highly increased paper submissions, and expanded TVCG’s presence in virtual and augmented reality. As IEEE CS President, I started the IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence (AI), an extremely successful co-sponsored journal with a large number of submissions, and put the basis for a new co-sponsored IEEE Conference on AI through a memorandum of understanding. During my presidency, we started the Quantum Week Conference in October 2020, in collaboration with several other societies and councils, which has been and continues to be an extremely successful event. This also shows my focus on promoting and supporting collaborations with other IEEE units.
Open science and open access. As IEEE CS President, I expanded the IEEE CS open-access journal portfolio with the IEEE CS Open Journal (OJ-CS), which has been extremely successful, getting an impact factor (of 5.9) in record time. I played a leading role in conference open access before in my leadership positions inside the Computer Society, promoting pilot projects with selected CS conferences, and then serving as a TAB representative in the IEEE Conferences committee from 2021-2023. I am and have been an active member of the IEEE ad-hoc committee on open access in conference publications which developed alternative open access models and case studies, these latter in collaboration with the Computer Society. I had a constant focus on open science and research reproducibility as IEEE CS President, as IEEE Publication Services and Products Board (PSPB) member, and in my leadership in TVCG. As editor-in-chief of IEEE TVCG, I conducted one of the two IEEE CS pilot projects in reproducibility, participating in the graphics community replicability initiative, and enhancing TVCG papers with their reproducible code and data. As the 2020 CS President, I created and actively participated in an ad-hoc committee on reproducibility consisting of leading experts in the field including IEEE PSPB volunteers and staff members, which produced a roadmap for professional societies, including case studies, tools, and sustainable revenue models.
Financial sustainability: When I was IEEE Computer Society President in 2020, a year of unprecedented challenges and transformative changes, and, despite the difficult worldwide economic situation the IEEE CS generated a record-breaking surplus for the 2020 budget, nearly doubling IEEE CS reserves which got to an entirely unexpected and unprecedented level. This allowed us to start in 2020 an IEEE CS Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) fund in the IEEE Foundation dedicated to support D&I projects proposed by the members through a call-for-proposal and decision process that I started in 2021 as Chair of the IEECS Diversity and Inclusion Committee.
Governance. As 2020 IEEE Computer Society President, I have been actively working, in collaboration with the Board of Governors and Executive Committee, on restructuring the volunteer organization of the Society to improve volunteer participation and streamlining the decision process.This has been achieved through the enlargement of the Board of Governors with the participation of representatives of editors-in-chief and Technical Committee chairs, so as to increase the bottom-up engagement of our volunteers in decisions and policy development, and through the operational simplification of IEEE CS program boards, by decreasing the number of committees, merging subcommittees, and, in general, reducing the length of decision processes.
Diversity and inclusion: As IEEE CS President, I created a permanent committee on Diversity and Inclusion (D&I), one of the first within IEEE, that I chaired in 2021 and a dedicated D&I fund in the IEEE Foundation. Some of the D&I activities I promoted include: a) definition of best practices for conferences and publications; b) outreach strategies through a dedicated website, an interview series, featuring several prominent scientists and professionals from underrepresented minorities in the computing field, as well as dedicated panels to encourage scientists and practitioners from underrepresented groups to pursue leadership roles; c) support to the participation in the Grace Hopper Celebration through student and professional scholarships; d) definition of best practices for eliminating the use of racist, biased, and culturally insensitive language in journal and conference articles, standards, and other products, resulting in the first complete taxonomy of discriminatory language in the computing literature; e) collaboration with Women in Engineering on a diversity-related project featuring successful case studies of gender inclusion in CS activities and with active support and participation in their “Returning Mother Program”.

IEEE Activities

IEEE Division VIII Director/Delegate, 2023-24
IEEE Division VIII Director-Elect, 2022
Member, IEEE Conferences Committee, 2021-2023
Member, IEEE Conference Publications Committee, 2021
Member, IEEE Publication Services and Products Board, 2023
Member, IEEE Technical Activities Board (TAB), 2020 and 2023-24
Member, IEEE Ad-Hoc Committee on Leadership Continuity & Efficiency, 2024
Member, IEEE Conference Open Access Ad-Hoc Committee, 2021-present
Member, IEEE BOD Ad-Hoc Committee on Coordinating IEEE Response to Multimedia-based Digital Reality Technologies, 2023
Member, IEEE TAB Directors Forum, 2022-24
Member, IEEE TAB President Forum, 2020
Member, IEEE Ad-Hoc Committee on Conference Diversity Best Practices, 2021
Member, IEEE USA Research and Development Policy Committee, 2020

Past-President, IEEE Computer Society, 2021
President, IEEE Computer Society, 2020
President-Elect, IEEE Computer Society, 2019
Founding Chair, IEEE Computer Society Diversity and Inclusion Committee, 2021
Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion, 2020
Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Planning Committee, 2019
Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Constitution and Bylaws Committee, 2019
Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Audit Committee, 2018
Vice-Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Fellow Evaluation Committee, 2017 and 2018
Member of the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors (BoG), 2017-present
Member of the IEEE Computer Society Nomination Committee, 2019
Member of the IEEE Computer Society Intersociety Cooperation Committee, 2019-2020
Member of the IEEE Computer Society Constitution and Bylaws Committee, 2018, 2020
Member of the IEEE Computer Society Audit Committee, 2017
Member of the IEEE Computer Society Transactions Operations Committee, 2015-2018
Member of the IEEE Computer Science Publication Board, 2015-2018, 2020
Member of the IEEE Computer Society Fellow Evaluation Committee, 2016
Member of the IEEE Computer Society Ad-hoc Growth Committee, 2018
Member of the IEEE Computer Society Ad-hoc J1C2 Committee, 2018
Member of the IEEE Computer Society Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics Editor-in-Chief Search Committee, 2018
Member of the Executive Committee of the IEEE Computer Society Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee (VGTC), 2015-2018
Pioneer Member of the IEEE Computer Society Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee
Member of the IEEE Computer Society Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Technical Committee, 2019 – present

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

Steering Committee Member, IEEE TopoinVIs, since 2022
Program Committee Member, IEEE VIS 2022, Oklahoma City, October 16-21, 2022
Program Committee Member, IEEE VIS 2021, New Orleans, October 24-29, 2021
Program Committee Member, IEEE VIS 2020, Salt Lake City, October 25-30, 2020
Chair, SciVis Best Paper Award Committee, IEEE VIS 2019, Vancouver, October 20-25, 2019
Program Committee Member, IEEE VIS 2019, Vancouver, October 20-25, 2019
Program Committee Member, Joint IEEE/ Eurographics Conference on Visualization (Eurovis), Leipzig, June 17-21, 2013
Program Committee Member, IEEE VIS 2012, Seattle, October 14-19, 2012
Program Committee Member, IEEE VIS 2011, Providence, October 23-28, 2011
Program Committee Member, IEEE VIS 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

Member of the IEEE Italy Section - R8 (until 2016)
Member of the IEEE Washington Section - R2 (since 2017)
Member of the IEEE Computer Society
Member of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society
Member of the IEEE Systems Council
Member of IEEE Women in Engineering

Position Statement

Position Statement for IEEE Division V Director/Delegate Election

IEEE is a global leader in science and technology. Several challenges must be addressed for ensuring a continued growth building on its many strengths:

Define new strategies for engaging and effectively serving the diverse IEEE member community, through personalized focus and benefits, concentrating on the young generation and the needs of members all over the world.
Strengthen cooperation across IEEE units and extensively promote collaborations to concentrate efforts on new professional trends and societal challenges as well as technological innovations across the multi-facet units and its volunteer base.
Maintain and strengthen the consistent focus on diversity and inclusion, by promoting membership through outreach strategies and involving underrepresented groups as volunteers in publications, conferences, and governance.
Lead in open science, by developing sustainable business models for open access, rethinking, and innovating the services offered, and enhancing activities in research reproducibility.

I believe I am uniquely positioned to address these challenges, if elected, by drawing on my professional background and my current and past experience in IEEE and in the Computer Society.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are the opinions of the author and not necessarily the opinions of IEEE.

Research

Major research contributions

Hierarchical models for graph representation and analysis.
Mesh-based multi-resolution modeling of surfaces and 3D shapes.
Level-of-detail modeling for analysis and visualization of 3D scalar fields.
Hierarchical terrain models for terrain processing and visualization.
Algorithms for visibility computation on triangulated terrain models.
Feature-based modeling and understanding for product design and manufacturing.
Data structures for meshes and simplicial complexes.
Shape modeling and visualization based on combinatorial topology.

Current research areas

Spatial data analysis and visualization
Spatial data structures
Topological data analysis (TDA)
Topology-based data visualization

Check NSF project: Geospatial Data Representation and Analysis through the Stellar Decomposition

Check GeoVis group webpage: https://geovis.umiacs.io/ to find detailed descriptions of the current projects and an list of software tools produced by the GeoVis group and made available on GitHub.