Craig Knoblock Named Michael Keston Executive Director of the USC Information Sciences Institute

by Rishbha Bhagi

Craig Knoblock, Michael Keston Executive Director of USC’s Information Sciences Institute

Dr. Craig Knoblock’s appointment as the Michael Keston Executive Director of USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI) and concurrently as Vice Dean of Engineering, was extended for the next fiscal year, beginning July 1, 2020. Dr. Knoblock has been serving as the interim ISI director since 2018.

Dr. Knoblock is research professor of both Computer Science and Spatial Sciences at USC, and director of the Data Science Program at USC. He received his B.S. degree from Syracuse University and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in computer science.

Dr. Knoblock’s research focuses on techniques for describing, acquiring, and exploiting the semantics of data. He has worked extensively on source modeling, schema and ontology alignment, entity and record linkage, data cleaning and normalization, extracting data from the Web, and combining all these techniques to build knowledge graphs. Dr. Knoblock has received 7 best paper awards, and has had over 400 journal articles, book chapters, and conference and workshop papers published. He is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), past President and Trustee of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), and winner of the Robert S. Engelmore Award.

As the Keston Executive Director of ISI, Dr. Knoblock is responsible for sustaining and strengthening an environment where the groundbreaking basic and applied research of ISI’s faculty and staff researchers, post-doctoral, and graduate students at ISI can flourish. These diverse research programs attract over $100 million in funding annually, with emphases on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, internet and networked systems, medical informatics, quantum computing, and advanced electronics.

“It is a great pleasure for me to extend Craig’s appointment as the Keston Executive Director of ISI,” said Yannis C. Yortsos, dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. “Craig has been an outstanding director, visionary, and a great partner in advancing research and scholarship in the rapidly changing realm of Information Sciences. I look forward to continuing our strong collaboration.” He continued, “All of us at the Viterbi School also remain indebted to Linda and the late Michael Keston and their family, for their generous philanthropy and support for ISI. This includes the endowment of the ISI directorship and the support of seed funds for innovative research.”

“I’m deeply honored to be selected as the next executive director for the institute,” said Dr. Knoblock. “As the director, my goals are to continue to make ISI an outstanding place to work, grow the research funding, faculty and students, and continue to pursue impactful research projects.”

Published on June 16th, 2020

Last updated on June 16th, 2020

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