Former student Khairi Reda joins CS faculty
Former student Khairi Reda joins CS faculty
Associate Professor Khairi Reda joined the computer science department this fall. Reda earned both of his graduate degrees from UIC; he completed his MS in 2009 and his PhD in 2014. He works primarily in data visualization and computer graphics.
After graduation, Reda completed postdocs at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Argonne National Laboratory. He then spent almost a decade as both an assistant and associate professor with Indiana University in Indianapolis. He earned his BS from Damascus University in Syria.
While in Indiana, Reda worked on a project to visualize patterns and predict the factors that lead up to drug overdoses, providing local health teams with real-time information. The data is anonymized and culled from interactions with medical services, police, and emergency personnel. Reda is hopeful the work can become part of a nationwide effort to reduce overdoses.
“We’re getting data about every person who had passed of an overdose in Indiana, and then, based on that, we’re visualizing their trajectories and interactions with pharmacies, the legal system, and with emergency services,” Reda said. “We have a dashboard that digests this data and pushes it out in a visual form, and it’s available at a local level.”
Reda also envisions ways to improve data analysis systems so users can interpret data more easily and correctly. The project earned Reda an NSF CAREER award.
Reda is focused on developing techniques that help analysts interpret and convey their data accurately and guard against visualizations that seem convincing but that are likely to be misleading.
“Statistics tends to be a really intimidating field for many, including myself,” Reda said. “If we can make tools that automatically check an analyst’s insights and conclusions, this can help them make more sound decisions.”
Another area of interest for Reda is designing effective visualizations to better communicate weather and climate data, making this data more understandable. He conducts user studies in a lab, gauging how well people can interpret these visualizations.
Reda’s research has been recognized through best paper and honorable mention awards at premier venues in visualization and human-computer interaction. His work has been funded by grants from the NSF, NIH, and DOE national labs.
Reda is thrilled to be back in Chicago, and at UIC in particular. He lives near campus and enjoys cycling on the lakefront. He is actively looking for graduate students, particularly PhD students, to work with him.
This fall, Reda is teaching CS 425, Computer Graphics I.