Beth A. Plale

Michael A and Laurie Burns McRobbie Bicentennial Professor of Computer Engineering

Director, Data to Insight Center
Affiliate faculty, Ostrom Workshop

Education

• Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Institute of Technology, 2001
• Ph.D. in Computer Science at State University of New York Binghamton, 1998
• M.S. in Computer and Information Science at Temple University, 1992
• MBA at University of LaVerne, 1986

Courses Taught at Luddy

• B438 Fundamentals of Computer Networks
• B534 Distributed Systems
• B649 Systems Support for Wide Area Applications Systems
• B669/I590 Topics in Data and Search Informatics
• E599 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence Concepts and Infrastructure
• I435/I535 Management Access and Use of Big and Complex Data
• I590 Topics in Data and Search Informatics
• P436 Introduction to Operating Systems

Biography

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 leads a task force on diversity, equity, and inclusion for the Luddy School for the 2020-21 academic year.  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).  She received the Early Career award from the Department of Energy (DOE).

Research Areas

• Data Science
• Intelligent Systems
• Artificial Intelligence
• High Performance Computing
• Parallel and Distributed Computing

Centers

• Data to Insight Center