Carolina Ruiz is the Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Harold L. Jurist ’61 and Heather E. Jurist Dean’s Professor of Computer Science. She joined the WPI faculty in 1997. Prof. Ruiz’s research is in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Data Mining, and their applications to Medicine and Health. She has worked on several clinical domains including sleep, pain, stroke, obesity and pancreatic cancer. Prof. Ruiz and her research group have developed novel, high-performing machine learning methods, including deep learning networks, for analyzing physiological sleep data; and machine learning approaches for discovering patterns in behavioral data, aimed at transforming sleep-related and diet-related behaviors and improving health. Prof. Ruiz has also worked on interdisciplinary research at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Computational Thinking and Education. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Henry Luce Foundation. She is a founding and core member of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, the Data Science, the Neuroscience, and the Artificial Intelligence Programs, and is also a member of WPI’s Center for Project-Based Learning. Prof. Ruiz has advised dozens of MS and PhD students, hundreds of undergraduate students, and a dozen high school students in disciplinary and interdisciplinary research projects. She has also advised projects at the intersection of science, technology and society at the WPI Project Centers in London, England, Wellington, New Zealand, and Zurich, Switzerland. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on AI, Machine Learning, and Data Mining. Prof. Ruiz has served as Associate Department Head of Computer Science; as an elected member on several WPI Faculty Governance committees including the Committee on Tenure and Academic Freedom (CTAF), the Committee on Academic Policy (CAP) and the Committee on Academic Operations (CAO); and as a faculty appointee on the WPI Board of Trustees’ Academic Planning Committee (APC).
