UF Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering

The buzz is palpable. That Fall semester energy is here. If you're a returning CISE student, Welcome Back!

If it's your first semester, Welcome! It's going to be great.

CISE doctoral student Reza Shahriari is lead author on a paper just published in “ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems” that examines common methods for including human feedback in large language models like ChatGPT.

So-called HITL methods specifically incorporate human feedback into the results generated by AI systems to improve their accuracy and performance. But how effective are they?

Learn more: https://bit.ly/4x13GF3

Summer Ph.D. commencement ceremony is this afternoon and we came upon Sudhira C getting in the spirit! Congratulations!

We're saddened to announce that CISE Professor Emeritus Gerhard X. Ritter, Ph.D., passed away this spring at the age of 89. Ritter had a long and distinguished career at the University of Florida, joining first the Department of Mathematics in 1971, then the emerging Department of Computer and Information Science in 1986, later renamed CISE. Ritter served as CISE department chair from 1998 to 2008.

“Gerhard helped steer the department through many challenging times,” remarked former CISE chair Patrick Traynor, Ph.D. “We are all the beneficiaries of a life dedicated to academic and community service whether or not we had the pleasure of knowing him personally.”

Ritter was perhaps best known for developing image algebra, a mathematical formalism that unifies linear and nonlinear mathematics in the image domain, supporting rigorous algorithm development, analysis and testing for image- and signal-based applications.

Learn more about his remarkable career: https://bit.ly/4xcbgMJ

“Adopting agile” and “leading large-scale enterprise transformations” might not be phrases commonly associated with computer engineering, but to Gator Engineer Mike Cottmeyer (BSCEN ’93), it all makes sense.

The CEO of LiminalArc, formerly Leading Agile, received his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering (then bestowed by the College of Liberal Arts) from the University of Florida in 1993. And since then, it’s been quite a ride.

Also, he collects guitars.

Learn more about this fascinating CISE alumnus and his journey: https://bit.ly/4prLYrm

With a career already filled with accolades and honors, Juan Gilbert, Ph.D., was recently elected to membership in the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence, or NAAI.

Gilbert is the Andrew Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Distinguished Professor in CISE.

The NAAI is an international scientific organization dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence, scientific innovation, interdisciplinary research and global academic collaboration.

Gilbert received this distinction in part for his “meaningful achievements and sustained contributions to the advancement of artificial intelligence,” said Michael Chu, the NAAI secretariat. “Gilbert’s election to the NAAI is a recognition of his academic accomplishments, professional excellence and his impact within the global AI community.”

More: https://bit.ly/4aWAOow

Students from the UF Data Studio, led by Christan Grant, Ph.D., and the Data Science Research Lab, led by Daisy Zhe Wang, Ph.D., are celebrating two wins in the area of computational linguistics and translating multimodal images and captions from very low resources languages.

New techniques developed by the labs led to a first place overall win for the AmericasNLP shared task at the 2026 Association for Computational Linguistics Conference and a first place overall win at the 11th Conference on Machine Translation.

Grant is the Arnold and Lisa Goldberg Rising Star Associate Professor in Computer Science.

Learn more about the work: https://aclanthology.org/2026.americasnlp-6.19/ and https://ufdatastudio.com

UF Innovation and WCJB TV20 are spotlighting election security research at the University of Florida! 🗳️

Led by UF Computer & Information Science & Engineering's Juan Gilbert, Ph.D., who leads the Computing for Social Good Lab in the , the team is pioneering new innovations in voting technology designed to guarantee that every vote is cast as intended and counted as cast.

The lab has developed a transparent voting machine that turns paper into a touch screen, with a fully transparent hardware body to ensure no unauthorized components can be added. By using a read-only Blu-ray disc instead of a hard drive and forcing a system reboot after every voter, the technology ensures that malicious code cannot be stored, creating a transparent, secure, and verifiable voting process.

Learn more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDz94CnjuN4

Congratulations to Jaime Ruiz, Ph.D., recently promoted to the rank of professor. CISE is so proud of Dr. Ruiz's hard work, dedication and commitment to the department.

Congratulations to Kevin R.B. Butler, Ph.D., who has been named the chair of CISE. He succeeds Patrick Traynor, Ph.D., who served as interim department chair for the past academic year. Butler joined UF in 2014 as part of the university’s Rising to National Preeminence Hiring Program.

“I am deeply honored and humbled to take on the position of chair, and I’m grateful for the support and leadership that has set the department up for sustained future success,” he said.

Butler received his master’s degree from Columbia University and his doctorate from Pennsylvania State University.

Learn more about this impactful leadership change and Butler's vision for the future of CISE: https://bit.ly/43rnOTH