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Hiring for multiple Faculty Positions

ABOUT UNC CHARLOTTE’S COLLEGE OF COMPUTING AND INFORMATICS

The College of Computing and Informatics (CCI) at UNC Charlotte is one of the most comprehensive and innovative computing colleges in the country. With over 140 faculty and staff and 4,800 students, CCI graduates more than 1,300 Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D. holders a year. The College is organized in four academic units: Department of Computer Science (CS), Department of Software and Information Systems (SIS), Department of Bioinformatics and Genomics (BiG) and the School of Data Science (SDS). CCI has distinct research strengths in AI & Machine Learning, Cybersecurity & Privacy, Computational Bioinformatics & Genomics, Human-Centered Design, High-Performance Computing and CS education. Located in Charlotte, the largest and fastest growing city in the Carolinas, CCI engages with the community and neighboring industries around common social, research, and development initiatives. The College is an active innovation partner with every major industry in the region.

The College’s curricula, pedagogy, and administrative structures are designed to be modern, agile, adaptable, and ethical. CCI enrolls and graduates one of the largest computing student populations in the country. It was featured in a 2020 Communications of the ACM article and presented as a model of excellence for other computing programs. At the Masters level, CCI has been broadening its offerings to meet the growing needs of lifelong learning for professional development and personal growth.

The College has a vibrant and innovative research program with an annual expenditure of more than $10M/year. In Dec. 2022, CCI ranked 39th in the latest NSF Higher Education Research & Development (HERD). Nine faculty members are NSF Career awardees, one is a AAAI Feigenbaum Awardee, and six were ranked among the top two-percent of scientists in the world based on the study conducted and published in 2020. The CCI faculty research and programs rank high in almost every metric (Visualization top 30, parallel and high-performance computing (PHPC) top 40, and Robotics top 45). Expertise in the college is clustered around the scientific foundations of computing and algorithms; the engineering of complex, high performance, reliable, and secure computing systems; the nature and quality of collaborations between humans and computing systems; and the use of computational methods to understand, predict, and affect biological and human systems. By design, the College’s research is driven by a balance between an unbounded curiosity for fundamental questions and an urgent sense of mission to affect the important issues we face as a society. Cross-pollination between the researchers and the disciplines is highly encouraged and supported. This is what led, for example, to the creation of the School of Data Science, a school grounded in CCI and composed of faculty from four other university colleges interested in the application and use of data analytics to a wide range of areas from genomics to political science, criminal justice, misinformation detection, to education.

The college has more than 20 faculty members whose primary area is in Artificial Intelligence. Research includes machine learning foundations and applications, natural language processing, computer vision, robotic collaboration, augmented reality, visualization, and high-performance computing. Our research is supported mainly by NSF, NIH, DOE, DoD, NASA, and DoEd.  The college, through the School of Data Science, runs an annual conference on data analytics, highly attended by the local fintech and other industries. CCI also houses an Industry – University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) site in Visual and Decision Informatics, and has partnerships in AI with the Electric Power Research Institute, Intel, Lowe’s, Wake Forest University Health Sciences, and Duke University Medical Center.

For more than 20 years, cybersecurity and privacy has been a cornerstone of CCI’s education and research. CCI was one of the first colleges to obtain the designation of Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education and Research by the National Security Agency in recognition of the wide range of cybersecurity educational programs and cutting-edge research conducted by its faculty and students to enable industry and government professionals to protect their organizations from cyber threats. CCI hosts an annual symposium in Cybersecurity every fall, attended each year by more than 700 professionals. CCI also houses the Cyber Defense and Network Assurability (CyberDNA) Research Center.

In line with the national trend towards cross disciplinary research with a focus on impact, CCI has been growing its research imprint and collaboration as measured by the number of collaborative proposals, the number of ongoing collaborations with other disciplines and the focus on mitigating current and future risks. The relevance and impact of the research of our bioinformatics faculty in understanding the genetic signatures of viruses and their mutational trajectories came to full light during Covid-19 epidemics and reinforced the need to redouble these areas of focus. The application of their work to wastewater testing in student living spaces was featured in the New York Times in 2020.  One of the new interdisciplinary research awards is the site of an NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) [$26M/5yrs, extendable to $52M/10yrs], where UNC Charlotte is a major partner on the NSF Precision Microbiome Engineering (PreMiEr) national research center. 

CCI is a founding member of the Center for Computational Intelligence to Predict Health and Environmental Risks  (CIPHER), to understand, prevent and combat disease outbreaks, drawing on the creativity of researchers across the University to advance vital outcomes. Through CIPHER, experts in computer science, bioinformatics, biological sciences, mathematics, geography, public health, education and communications use computational and empirical research to counter the spread of infectious diseases, and address antibiotic resistance, food safety and ecosystem health.

Most recently, in 2023 two pilot interdisciplinary centers have been established; the AI Center for Human Digital Twins and Computational Health (AI4Health), and the center for environmental monitoring and analytics technologies.