Shih-Fu Chang

Shih-Fu Chang

Research Interest

Shih-Fu Chang is dean of Columbia Engineering, where he leads the education, research, and innovation mission of Columbia Engineering with more than 240 faculty, 1,800 undergraduate students, and 2,700 graduate students. At Columbia Engineering, Dean Chang is responsible for developing cross-disciplinary initiatives and industry collaborations; recruiting top faculty and students; and leading the development and implementation of the school’s strategy for diversity, equity, and inclusion. He has greatly contributed to the growth and advancement of the School, propelling it to be one of the top engineering programs in the nation. He plays a key role in the creation of the School’s guiding vision, Columbia Engineering for Humanity.

He has appointments in both the Electrical Engineering Department and Computer Science Department. His research is focused on computer vision, machine learning, and multimodal content analysis. A primary goal of his work is to develop intelligent systems that can extract rich information and knowledge from diverse data of multiple modalities, including images, video, language and audio. His work on content-based visual search in the early 90's set the foundation of this vibrant area. Over the years, he has developed innovative machine learning techniques and systems for image/video recognition, hashing-based scalable search, and multimodal knowledge graph extraction. His research results have been used in real-world applications, such as commercial video search engines, online human trafficking crime prevention, and brain machine interface products. His scholarly impacts can be seen in peer-reviewed publications , best paper awards, 30+ issued patents, and technology transfer.

For his long-term contributions, he was awarded the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award, ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement Award, the Honorary Doctorate from the University of Amsterdam, and the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award. He received the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates. He served as Chair of ACM SIGMM (2013-2017), Chair of Columbia Electrical Engineering Department (2007-2010), and advisor/founder for several companies. He is an Amazon Scholar, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), ACM, and IEEE, and an elected Academician of Academia Sinica.