Journey to Academia

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Journey to Academia  
Daniela Raicu, Assistant Professor School of
Computer Science, Tellecomunnications, and
Information Systems (CTI) DePaul University,
Chicago
Women in Computer Science and Engineering
Day Oakland University June 22nd, 2005
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Educational Background

• Bachelor of Science in Mathematics
• University of Bucharest, Romania
• Master of Arts in Computer Science
• Wayne State University, Detroit, MI
• Doctor of Philosophy in Systems Engineering
• Oakland University, Rochester, MI

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Work Experience

• Teaching Experience
• Teaching Assistant, Computer Science
• The Academy of Economics Studies
• Wayne State University
• Oakland University
• Industrial Experience
• Summer Intern
• Young Rubicam
• Accenture Technology Labs
• Ford Motor Company

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Motivation for an Academic Career

• Sense of autonomy, academic freedom
• Opportunity for continued learning, discovery
• Wise use of skills, abilities
• Sense of accomplishment
• Opportunity to impact others

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Academic Career at DePaul University

• Reduced course load for teaching during the
  first year
• Choose the courses to teach (over 200 courses
  offered
• in over 19 programs)
• data mining, data analysis and image processing
• Distance Learning Facilities
• Support for research
• two research labs Intelligent Information
  Processing lab Medical
• Informatics lab http//facweb.cs.depaul.edu/resea
  rch/vc/
• support for undergraduate research

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Academic Career at DePaul University (cont.)

• Annually feedback on tenure-track process
  progress
• Mentoring by senior faculty
• Sabbatical after the first three years of tenure
  track
• Geographical location

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Challenges
Balancing Professional Roles - How to develop,
prioritize and juggle teaching and research (even
less prepared for advising, grant writing,
institutional service)
Balancing Professional and Personal Life - How
to carve out personal, family and leisure time
(spouse/partners career, young children,
commuting relationships)
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Daily Activities

• Faculty advisor of the Delta Chapter of the UPE
  Society
• Teach two courses per quarter (8 new courses)
• Academic advisor
• Member of different school and external
  committees
• Research advisor for 8 undergraduate graduate
  students
• Research

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Research

• Medical Imaging
• Automatic Human Body Tissue Classification and
  Segmentation in Computed Tomography Images
• - Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Chicago
• NSF Program MedIX Medical Informatics
  eXperiences for undergraduate students

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MedIX Participants 2005
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Research
Microarray Data Analysis Development of
quantitative statistics for identifying,
extracting and comparing signatures that can be
used for bacteria source tracking purposes -
Argonne National Laboratories, Chicago Data
Mining for Intellectual Property Discovery of
relationships between different patent technology
using data mining techniques - DePaul
College of Law
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Demo HEART
OPEN To open a new Image.
SEGMENT Automatic segmentation of the regions of
interest
TEXTURE Automatic calculation of the texture
descriptors
CLASSIFICATION Automatic classification of the
segmented regions
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HEART Segmentation
The application allows users to change Snake /
Active contour algorithm parameters
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HEART Segmentation (cont.)
Button is clicked
User selects points around the region of interest
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HEART Segmentation
Show segmented organ
If the user likes the result of the
segmentation, then the user will go to the
classification step
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HEART Classification
Selection of texture models
Texture features corresponding to the selected
texture model are calculated and shown here
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HEART Classification
Results are shown as follows Predicted organ
Heart Probability 0.86 Rule used to predict that
this segmented organ is HEART
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Questions?