My advisor is Dr. David Hall.
Dr. Hall didn't start his career as an academic, although I am pretty sure that he wanted to be a professor all along. He just ended up taking the long way around before finally ending up in academics. His early career was dictated by the needs of the country. He enlisted (yes, enlisted) in the Air Force. Apparently that choice offered him the ability to complete his Masters degree, whereas getting a commission as an officer would have sent him right to OCS and off to Vietnam much quicker. He then ended up in a program in the Air Force tracking satellites, as they needed enlisted men with academic backgrounds in Astronomy. As one could imagine, there probably weren't many enlisted men qualified for this position.
After some time in the Air Force, Dave returned to complete a Ph.D. in Astronomy. He returned to the corporate sector afterwards, working for MIT Lincoln Labs, Computer Sciences Corporation and then finally, HRB Systems, where he moved to management roles as a Principal Engineer, Manager and Director. After a downsizing at HRB, he moved to Penn State, as the Associate Director of the Applied Research Lab. In 2001, Dr. Hall realized his dream of an academic life, and joined the new School of IST as a professor and Associate Dean for Research.
What is interesting about Dr. Hall's story is how unconventional his entry into the academy was. I appreciate his pursuit of his goals and definitely understand his desire to combine teaching, research and outreach. He has an appreciation for others who bring value to graduate education process who, for a variety of reasons, didn't necessarily hop from high school to college to graduate school. There is a lot of value in professional experience that isn't necessarily reflected in one's CV or resume.
Most of Dr. Hall's early research work is probably classified. Look at the companies that he worked for to see why - they're all defense contractors. However, Dr. Hall did manage to stake his claim on multi-sensor data fusion. He literally wrote the book on the topic. Today, his interests are related to multi-sensor data fusion and he is currently working on a new book, related to sensors, people as sensors and soft sensors of all sorts. It's really interesting stuff! As far as publications other than the books, Dave does attend the data fusion conference and publishes there regularly. He also publishes in a variety of IEEE journals and conferences. Here's a couple of links of conferences he has attended/attends:
http://datamining.it.uts.edu.au/conferences/iat08/
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentCon.jsp?punumber=4106198
http://www.ececs.uc.edu/~cdmc/mass/
As far as courses, Dr. Hall has taught several while at Penn State, even though his primary responsibilities over the last many years have been administrative. This doesn't keep him from the classroom completely. For instance, he has taught:
IST440W - IST Integration - which I completely missed!
IST497 - Information Systems Project Management
IST597/998 - Information Fusion (go figure!)
IST590 - The IST Graduate Colloquium
On a personal note, Dr. Hall is a fraternal twin. He is proud to claim that he shared a womb with a girl. The way I first met Dr. Hall is because of our twin connection - as I'm the father of identical twins. We "ran into" each because of this and our connections to Grace Lutheran Church.
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