Charles Isbell, executive associate dean and professor in the College of Computing, was named faculty athletics representative (FAR) to the Georgia Tech Athletic Association on June 6, 2017. His three-year term as FAR began July 1, 2017. The FAR serves as the liaison between the Institute and the Athletic Association on issues regarding rules compliance, developments at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), and activities related to Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) membership.
His first institutional service role at Tech was with the Institute Undergraduate Curriculum Committee, where he worked with student-athletes returning to finish their degrees. “Since the very beginning of being here as a faculty member, I’ve been interested in the way student-athletes interact with the rest of the institution,” he said.
For Isbell, understanding the experience of student-athletes is paramount to success in higher education. Athletic achievements can elevate a university’s profile to prospective students, and student-athletes’ relationship to the university is one that can be used as a model for the broader campus community.
“Anyone interested in higher education and how it has to grow and change has to understand how Division I athletics works at a university,” he said. “As higher education changes, we have to think of ourselves more as a community and consider what lets people build connections and keep coming back. It’s going to have to happen with all students, faculty, and staff, and athletics can be an example of how to do that well.”
While Isbell is a fan and frequent attendee of Georgia Tech athletic events, his support for student-athletes extends beyond the stands.
“I want the student-athletes to know I am here for them, and I intend to talk with them and be a resource for them,” he said. “I want them to know that and believe it, and know that I take it very seriously.”
Isbell’s research passion is artificial intelligence. In particular, he focuses on applying statistical machine learning to building autonomous agents that must live and interact with large numbers of other intelligent agents, some of whom may be human.
Isbell received his B.S. in computer science in 1990 from Georgia Tech and his Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998. After four years at AT&T Labs/Research, he returned to Georgia Tech in 2002 to join the faculty of the College of Computing. His research interests are varied, but recently he has been building autonomous agents that engage in lifelong learning when in the presence of thousands of other intelligent agents, including humans.
His work has been featured in the popular media, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as in technical collections. He also pursues reform in computing education. He was a developer of Threads, Georgia Tech’s new structuring principle for computing curricula, and one of the key developers in Georgia Tech’s new MOOC-supported Master of Science in Computer Science, the first of its kind in the world. He teaches several courses both to on-campus students and to students around the world in Tech’s Online master of science in computer science program.
