About

During the 2016 Fall Semester, the Rossin College initiated an Envisioning Process. Its primary focus was to identify approaches that would enhance the research scholarship, impact, and reputation of the College, and, by extension, of Lehigh University. The Process was implemented by three faculty-led teams with three separate missions. Envisioning Team 3 was asked to identify broad interdisciplinary research themes in which Lehigh should strive to be the (or one of the) intellectual leader(s) over the next decade. These themes must be of significant long-term importance to society and must be areas in which Lehigh can differentiate itself, building on current strengths and growing via University investment.

In the summer of 2017, Dean DeWeerth invited faculty to be part of the Data Science and Intelligent Systems Faculty Council, primarily from engineering but also including faculty from other colleges. Co-chairs of the council were Katya Scheinberg and Héctor Muñoz-Avila. Other members included Wei-Min Huang (Mathematics), Wonpil Im, Brian Davison, Paolo Bocchini, Srinivas Rangarajan, Parv Venkitasubramaniam, Rebecca Wang (Marketing), and Nader Motee.

That fall, the Council voted to name the proposed IRI “DISC: Data, Intelligent Systems and Computation.” That semester (and into the following spring) that group worked to develop core themes and proposed an organization of the Institute. The three initial IRIs were announced by the Provost in April of 2018, and Profs. Scheinberg and Muñoz-Avila were named as founding Co-Directors for I-DISC. In the following weeks, I-DISC invited faculty across the university to become members of the new Institute. Institute operations began in earnest that fall, albeit with a much smaller scale than originally envisioned.

In September 2020, Prof. Larry Snyder, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, was appointed Director of I-DISC, having previously served as Co-Director. Prof. Kate Arrington, Department of Psychology, in the College of Arts and Sciences, and Prof. Brian Davison, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, were appointed as Associate Directors; both previously served on the Faculty Advisory Council. Profs. Héctor Muñoz-Avila and Katya Scheinberg, founding Co-Directors of I-DISC, took on new roles. Prof. Muñoz-Avila is now a Program Director for Information Integration and Informatics (III) at the National Science Foundation (NSF). Prof. Scheinberg is a faculty member in the Operations Research and Information Engineering department at Cornell University.

I-DISC has identified the following objectives and goals. 

• Have I-DISC faculty members from a wide range of departments, programs, and disciplines, including both methodological data- and computation-related fields (e.g., computer science, industrial engineering) and fields that make applied use of data and computation (e.g., psychology, education, public health, business). 
• Have I-DISC Research Groups that cover a broad range of methodological and applied fields.
• Provide grant-writing and reviewing services to I-DISC faculty working on collaborative grant proposals. 
• Offer expertise to faculty members in the form of I-DISC Fellow services and other resources.
• Host events throughout the year to foster collaboration and education. Provide administrative, planning, and logistical support for larger events such as conferences and workshops.
• Center diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) as a critical aspect of both I-DISC-related science and I-DISC’s procedures, policies, and practices.