IEEE Spectrum, the technology magazine of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences, recently published a profile of GEOG Professor and CGIS faculty member, Dr. Leila De Floriani.
This article features IEEE Board of Directors member Leila De Floriani, among others.
IEEE Fellow Leila De Floriani - Director, Division VIII
De Floriani is a mathematician, computer scientist, and educator with academic experience in Europe and the United States. She is a pioneer in data visualization and geometric modeling. Her work on multi-resolution terrain modeling and visualization has been extensively used in geographic information systems, video games, flight simulators, and web-based terrain navigation tools. Her recent work on topology-based analysis resulted in software tools for tree segmentation and reconstruction from big forestry data acquired through lidar. These tools have been used to track forest characteristics in connection with carbon emission evaluation and forecasting forest evolution.
As the 2020 president of the IEEE Computer Society, De Floriani established a permanent committee on Diversity and Inclusion. Additionally, she strengthened the society’s leadership in open access and open science—focusing on research reproducibility, which led to a roadmap for professional societies. She is also a member of the IEEE Conferences Committee.
Having authored more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific publications, De Floriani served as editor in chief of the IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics from 2015 to 2018. She introduced research reproducibility projects by publishing papers enhanced with reproducible code and data.
De Floriani is a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition and Eurographics Association. She was named a pioneer by the Solid Modeling Association designation that honors early contributors and those who have expanded the field. She also received the IEEE Computer Society Golden Core recognition for her long-standing service to the society.
She is also an inducted member of the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community Visualization Academy and the IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu honor society.
