Mary Elaine Califf has accepted the position of director of the School of Information Technology. Califf has been serving as the interim director; her permanent duties will begin July 1.
Califf received her B.A., M.A., and M.S. from Baylor University. She earned her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin and began teaching at Illinois State University in 1998.
Her primary research interests are in artificial intelligence, particularly in the areas of machine learning and natural language processing, and she teaches the school’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course. She has also published papers on computer science education, primarily concerning teaching beginning programming courses.
Califf’s current research projects involve applying learning algorithms to natural language processing tasks and data analysis.
