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Daniel P. Lopresti

   Professor, Computer Science and Engineering
  
Chair, Computing Research Association's
      Computing Community Consortium (CCC)
   Past-President
, International Association
for
      Pattern Recognition (IAPR)



Lehigh University
113 Research Drive
Bethlehem, PA  18015  USA

Phone:  
(610) 758-5782
Email*:  


Office:  
Mountaintop Building C 337
Daniel
                          Lopresti

Daniel Lopresti received his bachelor's degree from Dartmouth in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton in 1987. After completing his doctorate, he joined the Department of Computer Science at Brown and taught courses ranging from VLSI design to computational aspects of molecular biology and conducted research in parallel computing and VLSI CAD. He went on to help found the Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory in Princeton, and later also served on the research staff at Bell Labs where his work turned to document analysis, handwriting recognition, and biometric security.

In 2003, Dr. Lopresti joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Lehigh where his research examines fundamental algorithmic and systems-related questions in pattern recognition, bioinformatics, and security. On July 1, 2009, he became Chair of the CSE Department and occupied the position for 10 years through several reappointments ending on June 30, 2019. Beginning on July 1, 2014, he served as Interim Dean of the P. C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science for a year. On July 1, 2015, he was named Director of the Data X strategic initiative, a role he held until June 2020.

Dr. Lopresti is also currently Chair of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC). He served as President of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) from 2021-22, and now holds the formal role of Past-President. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), and as an Area Editor for Computer Vision and Image Understanding (CVIU). He has co-authored over 175 peer-reviewed publications, and is a named co-inventor on 24 U.S. patents. Over his career, Dr. Lopresti has mentored more than 70 undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs, and personally facilitated professional networking connections for hundreds more.

Recent News of Note
CRA Computing Community Consortium Council
Since 2015, I have served on the Computing Community Consortium Council of the Computing Research Association.

I assumed the role of Vice Chair of CCC beginning in July 2020, and the Chair of CCC beginning in July 2022. By virtue of serving as CCC Chair, I am now also a member of the CRA Board of Directors.

CCC rolled out a series of over a dozen policy-oriented whitepapers (which we call "quad papers") in October and November of 2020 incorporating contributions from a large number of computing research leaders from around the country. I helped write several of them, including:
Check out this CCC blog posting and see the full list of whitepapers as they are released here.

Check out our recent work on "A 20-Year Community Roadmap for Artificial Intelligence Research in the US" (May/June 2019).

CCC presented during a number of panels at AAAS 2020 in Seattle -- click here for details. A nice Lehigh story about my involvement can be found here. And here is a link to a CCC blog posting about the AI Roadmap panel I was involved in.

Check out the CCC Catalyzing Computing Podcast series!

And also the recently announced Computing Innovation Fellows (CIFellows) Program for 2021.

In October 2021, I helped to organize the CCC Hybrid Workshop on Best Practices for Hybrid Workshops with my colleagues Sujata Banerjee, Maria Gini, and Holly Yanko. Here is a link to the workshop report:  “‘Meta Hybrid’ Visioning Activity Report Out”.

I am co-organizer of a panel session we will present at AAAS 2022 entitled " Intelligent Infrastructure for All: Challenges and Opportunities."
International Association for Pattern Recognition
At the ICPR 2020 conference in Milan (virtual), I was elected President of IAPR and served in that role for two years after having previously been elected to serve as Treasurer at ICPR 2018 in Beijing. I now serve in the role of Past President. I am also serving on the IAPR Executive Committee during this time.
Artificial Intelligence
I was interviewed by Priscilla Liguori for a four-part series on the impact of AI which appeared on 69 News (WFMZ-TV) on July 25-28, 2023. Click here to watch the video.

On September 25, 2023, I appeared as a guest panelist to discuss generative AI on WFMZ-Ch. 69 Business Matters hosted by Tony Iannelli. Click here to watch the segment.

I was interviewed by Priscilla Liguori for a story on generative AI (“AI experts warn about fake images being shared amid Israel - Hamas war”) which appeared on 69 News (WFMZ-TV) on October 23, 2023. Click here to watch the video.
Cybersecurity
I was interviewed by Rob Manch for a story on cyberattacks on physical infrastructure which appeared on 69 News (WFMZ-TV) on November 28, 2023. Click here to watch the video.
Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub
I am happy to was invited to serve on the Seed Fund Steering Committee for the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub. We provided two rounds of awards to some amazing projects in 2020 and 2021.  Click here to read about the awardees.
Northampton County Election Commission
Effective January 1, 2020, I have been appointed as a member of the Northampton County Election Commission. This is an incredibly important civic responsibility, at a time when concerns about the trustworthiness and the security of our voting systems has never been higher.
CODE 8.7 Conference @ UN Headquarters
Along with colleagues from the Computing Research Association's CCC,  as well as UN University Delta 8.7, The Alan Turing Institute, Tech Against Trafficking, and others, I helped organize the CODE 8.7 Conference on Using Computational Science and Artificial Intelligence to End Modern Slavery. This took place in February 2019 at UN Headquarters in New York City. Click here for more details. To access a 30-minute CCC podcast we recorded right after the conference, click here. See, too, the CCC blog posting "Code 8.7: How We Can Advance Collaborative Problem Solving."

I also helped organize a followup workshop in Washington, DC, in March 2020:  CCC / Code 8.7 Workshop on Applying AI in the Fight Against Modern Slavery.

Here is the final report from that workshop:
  • "CCC / Code 8.7 Applying AI in the Fight Against Modern Slavery" (CCC Whitepaper), Daniel Lopresti (Lehigh University), Nadya Bliss (Arizona State University), Mark Briers (Turing Institute), Alice Eckstein (UNU-CPR), James Goulding (University of Nottingham), Anjali Mazumder (Turing Institute), and Gavin Smith (University of Nottingham), June 2021.
Check out "Artificial Intelligence and the Fight Against Human Trafficking" to read a Lehigh story about the work we are doing.

And also check out the upcoming panel session at the AI for Good Global Summit on February 24, 2021.
New Publications!
Check out the new books I helped edit with colleagues:
And a recent special issue of IJDAR I co-edited:
  • Special Issue on Advanced Topics in Document Analysis and Recognition, D.Lopresti, J. Lladós, and S. Uchida (editors), International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition, vol. 24, no. 3, September 2021.
TCFPGA Hall of Fame Class of 2018
One of my first papers, co-authored with colleagues in 1991*, was recently voted into the TCFPGA Hall of Fame (ACM/SIGDA Technical Committee on FPGAs). The award presentation took place at the IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines in April 2018.
* “SPLASH – Experience Building and Programming a Highly Parallel Programmable Logic Array,” M. Gokhale, W. Holmes, A. Kopser, S. Lucas, R. Minnich, D. Sweely, and D. Lopresti, IEEE Computer, January 1991, pp. 81-89.
Intelligent Infrastructure
On behalf of the Computing Reseach Association, I moderated a Congressional briefing for the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology on Jan. 30, 2018. Panelists included Henning Schulzrinne (Columbia University), Matthew Wansley (nuTonomy), Nadya Bliss (Arizona Statue University), and Elizabeth Mynatt (Georgia Tech). Click here for more details, and here to read a CRA blog posting about the panel session.

I also moderated a panel session titled "Rethinking Approaches to Disaster Management and Public Safety With Intelligent Infrastructure" at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Austin, TX on Feb. 16, 2018. Panelists included Michael Dunaway (University of Louisiana, Lafayette), Robin Murphy (Texas A&M University), and Nalini Venkatasubramanian (University of California, Irvine). Click here for more details, and here to read a CCC blog posting about the panel session
Lehigh Silicon Valley
Once again I led the Software Engineering Track for the highly successful Lehigh Silicon Valley Program (LSV++). I created the track in 2017 in collaboration with the leaders of the innovative Baker Institute. For 2018, we visited  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, OSIsoft, Adobe, Cisco, Google, Plug and Play Tech Center, and Bracket Computing. And in 2019, we visited OhmniLabs / Kambria, OSIsoft, Cisco, Adobe, Google, and Facebook.
Nano/Human Interfaces
I am a co-leader of Lehigh's Nano/Human Interfaces Presidential Engineering Research Initiative along with Martin Harmer and Jeffrey Rickman from Materials Science, Anand Jagota from Bioengineering, and Kate Arrington from Psychology. Click here to read the announcement and click here for the NHI website.
Data X Strategic Initiative
Data X is a major university-wide strategic initiative in the area of computing and data analytics. Among other efforts, the initiative included new faculty positions in CSE and other key interdisciplinary areas across the institution. I served as the Founding Director of Data X from 2015 through 2020. For the announcement, click here. For the Data X homepage, click here.
Lehigh Mountaintop Building C
For photos of Building C, once part of Bethlehem Steel's Homer Research Laboratories, click here. After a major renovation project, the CSE Department moved into its new home in Building C in January 2018. My office is no longer located in Packard Lab, it is now BC 215.

I was honored to play a role in the renovation of Building C. To view the slides for a talk I was invited to give, click here (this is a big PDF file). Here's a recent article about the project in Tradeline: From Steel to Software: Repurposing an Industrial Building for Education.
Mountaintop Experiential Learning Environment
I have had significant involvement in the development of Lehigh's new Mountaintop Project. For coverage of this activity, which began in Summer 2013 and continues to grow in size and scope, click here.
New Paradigm for Pattern Recognition Research
We are investigating a fundamentally new approach to conducting experimental pattern recognition research. Based on advances made possible by Web 2.0 technologies, our vision addresses a number of serious issues with the status quo, including over-reliance on small standard datasets, implicit bias in testing, and irreproducibility of experimental results. For more details on this idea which we call "DARE," click here.
Document Analysis and Exploitation
We have had an active research effort in the area of document analysis and exploitation for several years now. Much of this work has been conducted in collaboration with colleagues at BBN Technologies with funding from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Henry Baird and I were principal investigators, but congressional funding we received expanded the project to include other colleagues, including Hank Korth. To read a news article about the award, click here.
Electronic Voting
I served as an independent expert in the Banfield v. Cortés lawsuit challenging the use of certain electronic voting machines in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Click here to learn more about the case.

Click here for an excellent CCC-led whitepaper titled "Research Opportunities in Evidence-Based Elections" by Josh Benaloh, Philip Stark, Vanessa Teague, Melanie Volkamer, and Dan Wallach.

The PERFECT Project

A number of years ago we had a modest NSF CyberTrust grant to study issues surrounding the reliable processing of voting records, including paper ballots. Investigators on the project included George Nagy from RPI, Elisa Barney Smith from Boise State, Chris Borick from Muhlenberg, and Ziad Munson and myself from Lehigh. PERFECT is an acronym that stands for "Paper and Electronic Records For Elections: Cultivating Trust." Click here for the PERFECT project website.

For access to an important collection of scanned ballot images from a real election, click here.

We acquired examples of two full-face electronic voting systems manufactured by Danaher and Sequoia. These systems match those used in several PA counties, and were purchased from government surplus auctions on the web. For more information and media coverage, click below:
For other past news on the e-voting issue, click here.
Bioinformatics
Greg Lang from Biological Sciences and I led a team of student researchers in a 2014 Biosystems Dynamics Summer Institute project. The topic of the project was "Identification of Driver Mutations in Experimental Evolution" and derives from Greg's ongoing research. The Lehigh BDSI is funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

* My email address is expressed in image format to make it more difficult for "bots" to harvest it for spam purposes.


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© 2004 P.C. Rossin College of Engineering & Applied Science
Computer Science & Engineering, Packard Laboratory, Lehigh University, Bethlehem PA 18015