BU’s “Changemakers”: Crovella and Wildman Named Inaugural Duan Family Faculty Fellows in CDS
(Left to right: CDS Associate Provost Azer Bestavros, BU President Melissa L. Gilliam, and Professors Mark Crovella and Wesley J. Wildman at the December 2024 ceremony)
Boston University’s Mark Crovella and Wesley J. Wildman have been named the inaugural Duan Family Faculty Fellows (DFF) in BU’s Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences.
During the winter 2024 ceremony held at the Duan Family Center for Computing & Data Sciences, Crovella, CDS chair of academic affairs and professor of computer science in the College of Arts & Sciences, and Wildman, CDS chair of faculty affairs and professor of philosophy, theology, and ethics at Boston University, were recognized for their leadership and contributions to advancing interdisciplinary collaboration in data science. Before an audience of over 200, CDS Associate Provost Azer Bestavros praised the two scholars calling them “changemakers” and “cornerstones” of CDS.
“Critical to our vision and mission are distinguished faculty members who have the capacity and demonstrated track record of bridging disciplines and thus acting as ‘changemakers’ at BU,” Bestavros said. “Their selection is a recognition of their commitment to CDS's premise, vision, and mission – even before CDS was created – and their tireless efforts to make it the reality we have today. Simply put, they are two cornerstones of CDS.”
The Duan Family Faculty Fellows program aims to build a community of distinguished senior scholars with the track record and capacity to advance the vision and mission of CDS. These faculty fellowships are made possible by a generous gift from the Duan Family, which also supports BU Spark! experiential learning and innovation initiatives, research development, and PhD fellowships in the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences.
"We are grateful to the Duan Family for their enduring support of Boston University, and their belief in our University’s mission,” said BU President Melissa L. Gilliam. “Their generosity will help to ensure that we will continue to be on the cutting edge in computer and data science, while featuring some of the best minds in the field.”
The DFF Fellows program provides funding for research and teaching, increasing faculty flexibility and engagement, and strategically supports the university-wide Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences’ mission by fostering interdisciplinary connections and collaboration. Fellows will be ambassadors, mentoring junior faculty and contributing to tenure reviews and committees.
Crovella said it is “enormously gratifying” to be a DFF Fellow because the appointment supports the CDS mission, and his interest to advance his research in interpretable machine learning.
“Society is being transformed by the advent of generative AI, such as ChatGPT and other large language models. I believe we have a responsibility to do our best to understand exactly how these models work and why they do what they do,” he said. “I believe that this type of research is ideally situated in CDS and is a natural fit for the academic and research model that is being pioneered by CDS.”
Wildman echoes this sentiment, saying the inaugural Duan Family Faculty Fellowship is deeply meaningful as it offers valuable resources to enhance his research and teaching impact.
In recent years, Wildman conducted large-scale surveys examining how ethical values are shaped differently in the high-tech era compared to the past, before social media, AI, and other advancements. He said the fellowship will help fund additional large-scale surveys of this kind and provide support for young researchers to analyze the results.
“Personally, and professionally, this means a lot to me. It will give me more flexibility and aligns with my commitment to CDS,” he said. “Having CDS show the same commitment to me is truly meaningful.”
Also speaking were BU Trustee Rebecca Norlander (CAS’91) and Gloria Waters, BU’s provost and chief academic officer. Attending the ceremony: Kenneth Freeman, former president ad interim (from left), Stan Sclaroff, dean of Arts & Sciences, President Emeritus Robert Brown, Rebecca Norlander, Trustees Chair Ahmass Fakahany (Questrom’79), Trustee Alicia Mullen (CAS’83), President Melissa Gilliam, Gloria Waters, and Azer Bestavros. Photo by Eric Haynes
Learn more about the Duan Faculty Fellowship here.
By Maureen McCarthy
About the Inaugural Duan Family Faculty Fellows
Excerpt from Associate Provost Azer Bestavros’ December 5, 2024, speech
Mark Crovella is a distinguished computer scientist whose career is marked by a passion for unraveling the complexities of data, a commitment to education, and a genuine enthusiasm for collaboration. Over more than three decades at BU, he has balanced cutting-edge academic research, applied work in industry, and service to his profession and the University.
Professor Crovella's career could be described as one that has pursued data science since before data science was a recognized field. He has brought groundbreaking insights into diverse areas, from how the Internet functions to the intricacies of biological and social networks.
Cited over 30,000 times, his work reflects the considerable influence he has had in shaping our understanding of network behavior and data science. Notable among his contributions is his co-authored book "Internet Measurement: Infrastructure, Traffic, and Applications", a foundational text in its field.
Along the way, Professor Crovella made contributions in very diverse areas. He has worked on inferring users' voting preferences from their online activity and assessing how social media leads users toward extreme content. He has also shown how to find the causes of Internet disruptions, how to audit AI models to ensure desirable behavior, and how to predict the functions of protein molecules. The level of Professor Crovella's impact is evident from his election in 2011 as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and in 2012 as a Fellow of the IEEE, the two main professional bodies devoted to computer science research.
Professor Crovella has also been a BU leader, first as chair of the Computer Science Department from 2013-2018, and now as chair of academic affairs for the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences. In this latter role, he is helping shape a curriculum where data science crosses traditional boundaries, enriching disciplines from healthcare to the humanities. His current role grew out of his career-long interest in data science, beginning in 2019, when he chaired the first university-level committee to consider objectives for CDS curricula and degree programs.
Professor Crovella’s impact also extends beyond the classroom. As the Chief Scientist at Guavus, Inc. from 2012 to 2014, he helped transform how the company applied big data analytics to understand traffic in telecommunications networks. This work, and his industry experience with major companies like Network Appliance, led to his recognition as BU's Innovator of the Year in 2014. This industrial work has enriched his teaching and helped him bring relevance and practical considerations to his work as Chair of Academic Affairs in CDS.
Wesley J. Wildman grew up in a quiet corner of Australia. A first-generation college student, he completed degrees in math, physics, and computer science before crossing the academic tracks to learn philosophy, theology, and ethics, completing a PhD in philosophy of religion in 1993 and joining BU’s School of Theology and pursuing research in two directions simultaneously.
On the one hand, he has advanced a complex agenda in the philosophy of religion. His blended background and multidisciplinary expertise have given him a distinctive and influential voice in the philosophy of religion, yet he has always celebrated and supported the varied approaches within that field, including by running the field-wide clearinghouse website at philosophyofreligion.org.
Professor Wildman has invested heavily in the scientific study of the worldviews and lifeways within which we humans make meaning and orient our moral worlds. To that end, he combines humanities and social science perspectives with computational methods such as social simulation, social network analysis, natural language processing, and machine learning, aiming to understand and hopefully ease the seemingly intractable problems that arise within human societies.
Author of two dozen books and nearly 200 scholarly articles, Professor Wildman has recently been exploring fiction to communicate his philosophical and ethical concerns to a wider audience. His first novel, The Winding Way Home, appeared in 2023 and has been warmly received, with one reviewer writing “I have never read a novel more devastating nor more beautiful.” His most recent book is Modeling Religion: Simulation the Transformation of Worldviews, Lifeways, and Civilizations, which employs computational social simulation to examine the tangled history of human civilizations and their transformations, and to project into the future.
Professor Wildman has been a nonprofit entrepreneur for the last two decades. He is the Executive Director of Just Horizons Alliance, a public charity dedicated to fusing knowledge and wisdom for a more just and hopeful future by identifying and supporting adaptive responses to our cultural challenges – responses that are rooted in careful multidisciplinary research from human-in-the-loop computing to AI ethics.
Professor Wildman is chair of faculty affairs in CDS; he leads CDS’s Computational Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences initiative; he teaches required undergrad and graduate courses in AI ethics; and he supervises doctoral students in computational social science and computational humanities. In all he does, Professor Wildman is the embodiment of what it means to be a citizen of the Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences.
Learn more about the Duan Faculty Fellowship here.