UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — James Wang, professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology, has been conferred the title of distinguished professor, the highest professorial distinction at the University.
The title of distinguished professor recognizes the academic contributions of full-time faculty members who are acknowledged leaders in their fields of research or creative activity; demonstrate significant leadership in raising the University's standards in teaching, research, or creative activity and service; and exhibit excellent teaching skills.
“I am truly honored and thrilled for the recognition and am sincerely grateful for being nominated by my colleagues. IST faculty and staff have provided me with constant support and teamwork — without which my accomplishments in teaching, research and service would not have been possible,” said Wang. “I will strive to live up to the level of excellence this recognition demands.”
Added Andrew Sears, dean of the College of IST, “James is internationally recognized for his research in the areas of multimedia analysis, computer vision and information retrieval, and has a strong research record of applying his expertise to problems in a wide variety of domains, including biomedical sciences, meteorology, agriculture and art. He is an active and engaged mentor to students, many of whom have gone on to become successful academics and practitioners.”
Wang joined the IST faculty in 2000. His research seeks to advance knowledge in modeling objects, concepts, aesthetics and emotions in big visual data. Formerly with the Biomedical Informatics Group and the Computer Science InfoLab at Stanford, he undertakes work that makes possible the understanding of images based on machine learning and statistical modeling. Among other contributions, he and his collaborators have developed the SIMPLIcity semantics-sensitive image retrieval system, the ALIPR real-time computerized image tagging system, the ACQUINE aesthetic quality inference engine, and the ARBEE recognition system for bodily expressed emotion. Their research has been applied to several domains including biomedical image analysis, satellite imaging, photography, and art and cultural imaging.
Wang's research has been primarily funded by the National Science Foundation. At Penn State, Wang teaches applied data sciences, artificial emotional intelligence, theoretical foundations of information science, discrete mathematics, among others. He also guides a group of both graduate and undergraduate researchers through the James Z. Wang Research Group at Penn State, with a mission of advancing knowledge related to the analysis, management and understanding of large and complex visual data, and contributing to society through the dissemination of research findings and education of future leaders in the field.
He has received an NSF Career award, three Amazon Research Awards, and the endowed PNC Technologies Career Development Professorship. He has served as the lead guest editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Special Issue on Real-world Image Annotation and Retrieval (2008), the general chair of ACM Multimedia Information Retrieval events (2006, 2007, and 2010), and as an invited speaker at more than 110 institutions around the world. He is the author or co-author of two monographs and more than 65 journal articles.