profile

Dr. Plale is the Executive Director of IU’s Pervasive Technology Institute and Michael A and Laurie Burns McRobbie Bicentennial Professor of Computer Engineering both at Indiana University Bloomington (IU). Plale recently completed a 3-year term as a science advisor at the National Science Foundation (NSF) (2017-2021).   

Dr. Plale has a long career studying issues of trust in the products of scientific research, and how that trust can be strengthened through technology.   Her specific research and policy interests are in:

AI research infrastructure:  that democratizes access to the resources that fuel AI development.  Drawing on containerized workflow systems, synthetic data generation, persistent IDs, model commons, provenance, and secure computing environments, campus-focused cyberinfrastructure environments can provision for AI research that benefits both the cyberinfrastructure and society.

AI accountability: Plale is working on the technical and social mechanisms through which properties that enhance trustworthiness of AI can be identified and strengthened, and the software that can measure the accountability of an AI entity in accordance with properties exhibited at all levels of the software stack.

Open science and reproducibility:  Open science is prompting wide efforts to make data from research available for broader use. Plale is developing novel software solutions that will amplify the use of research data and software, drawing on the FAIR principles, knowledge graphs, and machine actionability of data as FAIR digital objects. 

Dr. Plale has served in a principal investigator (PI/PD) or co-principal investigator (co-PI) role on 62 external grant funded awards totaling just under $50 million. She is founder and director of the Data To Insight Center at IU which has had research funded by such external sources such as NSF, Department of Energy (DOE), Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Microsoft.

Dr. Plale’s postdoctoral studies were carried out at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her PhD in computer science is from the Watson School of Engineering at the State University of New York Binghamton.  She led the diversity, equity, and inclusion task force that produced the Luddy School Strategic Plan for Inclusive Excellence.  She is a founder of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), a founder of the Center of Excellence for Women & Technology (CEWIT), a founding director of the HathiTrust Research Center, and an inaugural chair of the RDA Technical Advisory Board (TAB).  Plale received the Early Career award from the Department of Energy (DOE).