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Issue: 11/30/11
Complexity of simple answers
2011 University Scholar Isabel Cruz
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11/30/11
Paul Francuch
Isabel Cruz: “We’re very much driven by real applications. What you do in your lab and what’s happening in the real world are not two different things.”
Photo: Joshua Clark
The University Scholars Program, now in its 27th year, honors faculty members for superior research and teaching, along with great promise for future achievements. The award provides $10,000 a year for three years.
Isabel Cruz creates programs that help visual data and information in ways that leave many thinking, "only a computer could figure out how to do this!"
She's a leading expert in such fields as visual query languages, data visualization and information integration, to name a few.
With her hands-on approach to advance technology, she is a prolific writer and often chairs conferences in her field.
"I'm always working on several things, depending on which day you're talking to me," she says.
A native of Lisbon, Cruz's mother is a mathematician and her father an electrical engineer. She took courses from IBM in her mid-teens and soon became a programming wiz.
After earning the equivalent of a master's degree in electrical engineering in Portugal, Cruz went to the University of Toronto for her Ph.D. in computer science. At Toronto, she studied and worked with Alberto Mendelzon, a leading authority on databases and a pioneer in the field of visual query languages, which Cruz helped develop.
"Alberto's ideas were very new at the time," Cruz recalls. Unlike textual query language, the visual variant "was a new field where you could ask more expressive queries that better reflected the needs of people."
Typing a question into a website or search engine to get answers is routine today. But it's taken a lot of work with algorithms, databases and information integration and alignment to get here. Many refinements are still on the drawing boards.
"I'm driven more and more by real applications, and deriving a lot by observing what users want," says Cruz.
Seemingly simple queries often require a lot of research and program development.
"People often ask me, 'Why can't I do this?' and it makes me think many experts have tried to solve this problem for years. It's not a minor thing. They are complete fields of research," Cruz says.
Taking diverse sources and depictions of information, then folding them all into a system program that almost immediately provides big-picture answers to thousands of possible questions is one of the tasks Cruz is tackling now.
She's developed a program called AgreementMaker, a system being tried by nearly 100 users around the world to perform tasks ranging from biomedical and anatomy applications to land use and urban planning. Various independent sources and forms of data are combined and matched to provide more intelligent answers to complex questions.
"We're very much driven by real applications," Cruz says. "What you do in your lab and what's happening in the real world are not two different things."
Besides teaching and research, Cruz finds time to plan and prepare professional conferences and meetings. She is a facilitator for campus groups such as WISEST, which helps advance women faculty in the STEM departments.
"It takes a lot of time, but it is really interesting and rewarding," she says.
"It has been able to really change something."
francuch@uic.edu
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