Shih-Fu Chang is the Richard Dicker Professor at Columbia University, with appointments in both Electrical Engineering Department and Computer Science Department. His research is focused on multimedia information retrieval, computer vision, machine learning, and signal processing. A primary goal of his work is to develop intelligent systems that can extract rich information from the vast amount of visual data such as those emerging on the Web, collected through pervasive sensing, or available in gigantic archives. His work on content-based visual search in the early 90s-VisualSEEk and VideoQ-set the foundation of this vibrant area. Over the years, he continued to develop innovative solutions for image/video recognition, multimodal analysis, visual content ontology, image authentication, and compact hashing for large-scale indexing. His work has had major impacts in various applications like image/video search engines, online crime prevention, mobile product search, AR/VR, and brain machine interfaces.

His scholarly work can be seen in more than 350 peer-reviewed publications, many best-paper awards, more than 30 issued patents, and technologies licensed to seven companies. He was listed as the Most Influential Scholar in the field of Multimedia by Aminer in 2016. For his long-term pioneering contributions, he has been awarded the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award, ACM Multimedia Special Interest Group Technical Achievement Award, Honorary Doctorate from the University of Amsterdam, the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award, and IBM Faculty Award. For his contributions to education, he received the Great Teacher Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates. He served as Chair of ACM SIGMM (2013-2017), Chair of Columbia Electrical Engineering Department (2007-2010), the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2006-2008), and advisor for several international research institutions and companies. In his current capacity as Senior Executive Vice Dean at Columbia Engineering, he plays a key role in the School's strategic planning, special research initiatives, international collaboration, and faculty development. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the IEEE, and a Fellow of the ACM.