Professor Gita Alaghband is the chair of the department, the director of the CSE-PhD program and a senior member of IEEE Computer Society. She received her B.S. degree in Physics (1976), M.S. in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of Colorado at Boulder in 1980 and 1986, respectively. She has been a visiting scientist at NASA, ICASE, a visiting professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a visiting scientist at Le Centre European de Recherche et de Formation Avancee en Calcul Scientifique, CERFACS, and a consultant with QWEST Information Technologies. Her recent research combines high-performance computation with AI and machine learning applications of computer vision which focuses on real-time multi-human tracking systems with applications in autonomous vehicles, robotics and surveillance, facial recognition and generation, and optimization of learning rates of deep learning convolutional neural networks.