Rate My Professor Gita Alaghband

Gita Alaghband serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the College of Engineering, Design and Computing at the University of Colorado Denver, positions she has held since 2009 and 1997, respectively. She is also Co-Director of the Computer Science Interdisciplinary PhD Program. Alaghband received her B.S. in Physics in 1976, M.S. in Computer Science in 1980, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1986 from the University of Colorado Boulder. Her academic career includes earlier roles as Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1987, Research Fellow at NASA Langley Research Center in 1985, and progressive faculty positions at the University of Colorado Denver since 1987, including previous terms as Chair from 1996 to 1999.

Her research specializes in parallel processing and distributed systems, high-performance computation, computer architectures, operating systems simulation, performance evaluation, sparse matrices, and applications of AI and machine learning in computer vision, including real-time multi-human tracking, facial recognition and generation, and deep learning optimization. Notable publications include the book "Fundamentals of Parallel Processing" (Prentice Hall, 2002, with Harry F. Jordan); "Deep curriculum learning optimization" (SN Computer Science, 2020, with H. Ghebrechristos); "AOL: Adaptive Online Learning for Human Trajectory Prediction in Dynamic Video Scenes" (BMVC 2020, with M. Huynh); and "Novel parallel method for association rule mining on multi-core shared memory systems" (Parallel Computing, 2014, with L. Vu). Alaghband has earned awards such as the NSF Research Initiation Award (1996), College of Engineering Outstanding Faculty Award (1994), IEEE Computer Society Senior Member (2002), and University of Colorado Excellence in Leadership (2001–2002). She directs the Parallel Distributed Systems Lab, has supervised multiple PhD graduates now in academia and industry, and has led NSF grants including REACH and Bridge to Doctorate. Her service includes chairing university committees, curriculum revisions that doubled departmental enrollment, and editorial roles on the Journal of Computer and Software Engineering.