Shih-Fu Chang

Dean of The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science and Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor of Engineering; and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

709 Schapiro CEPSR

Tel(212) 854-6894
Fax(212) 932-9421

Shih-Fu Chang is Dean of Columbia Engineering and Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor. He leads the education, research, and innovation mission of the School and has greatly contributed to its growth and advancement, propelling it to be one of the top engineering programs in the nation.

Research Interests

Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Multimedia Retrieval, Image Video Recognition, Multimedia Knowledge Extraction.

As one of the most influential experts in multimedia, computer vision and artificial intelligence, his research has led to development of innovative image search tools, which have been used by major media companies and law enforcement agencies in fighting online human trafficking crimes. He has also launched AI tools for online disinformation detection and attribution.

Dean Chang is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and IEEE, and an elected member of Academia Sinica. He received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Amsterdam and the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates. He is the inaugural director for Columbia Center of AI Technology in collaboration with Amazon. He received his BS from National Taiwan University in 1985 and his PhD from the University of California-Berkeley in 1993.

Research Experience

  • Amazon Scholar, 2020-2022
  • Visiting faculty, Microsoft Research, Beijing, 2006
  • Visiting faculty, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, 2004-2006

Professional Experience

  • Dean, Columbia Engineering, 2022-
  • Interim Dean, Columbia Engineering, 2021-2022
  • Senior Executive Vice Dean, Columbia Engineering, 2015–2021
  • Senior vice dean of engineering, Columbia University, 2012–2015
  • Chief Technical Advisor, VidRovr Inc., 2016-
  • Chief Technical Advisor, Axon Image Inc., 2015-
  • Richard Dicker Chair Professor, Columbia University, 2011–
  • Professor of computer science, Columbia University, 2011–
  • Chair of electrical engineering, Columbia University 2007–2010
  • Professor of electrical engineering, Columbia University, 2002–2011
  • Associate professor of electrical engineering, Columbia University, 1997–2002
  • Assistant professor of electrical engineering, Columbia University, 1993–1997

Professional Affiliations

  • Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
  • Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 
  • Fellow of Association of Computing Machinery (ACM)

Honors & Awards

  • National Academy of Engineering, 2023
  • National Academy of Inventors, 2022
  • Academia Sinica, 2018
  • Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery, 2017
  • Honorary Doctorate, University of Amsterdam, 2016
  • Most Influential Scholar in the Field of Multimedia, AMiner, 2016
  • Great Teacher Award, The Society of Columbia Graduates, 2013
  • Technical Achievement Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society, 2012
  • Technical Achievement Award, ACM Special Interest Group in Multimedia, 2011
  • American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2010
  • Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, IEE, 2009
  • Young Investigator Award, Office of Naval Research, 1998–2001
  • Career Award, National Science Foundation, 1995–1998

Selected Publications

Liu, Wei, Jun Wang, Rongrong Ji, Yu‐Gang Jiang, and Shih‐Fu Chang. "Supervised hashing with kernels." In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), IEEE Conference on, pp. 2074‐2081, 2012.

Wu, Xiao‐Ming, Zhenguo Li, Anthony M. So, John Wright, and Shih‐Fu Chang. "Learning with partially absorbing random walks." In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), pp. 3077‐3085. 2012.

Wang, Jun, Tony Jebara, and Shih‐Fu Chang. "Semi-supervised learning using greedy max‐cut." Journal of Machine Learning Research 14, no. Mar (2013): 771‐800.

Ye, Guangnan, Yitong Li, Hongliang Xu, Dong Liu, and Shih‐Fu Chang. "Eventnet: A large scale structured concept library for complex event detection in video." In Proceedings of ACM international conference on Multimedia, pp. 471‐480. ACM, 2015.

Borth, Damian, Rongrong Ji, Tao Chen, Thomas Breuel, and Shih‐Fu Chang. "Large‐scale visual sentiment ontology and detectors using adjective noun pairs." In Proceedings of ACM international conference on Multimedia, pp. 223‐232. ACM, 2013.

Smith, John R., and Shih‐Fu Chang. "VisualSEEk: a fully automated content‐based image query system." In ACM international conference on Multimedia, pp. 87‐98. ACM, 1997.