Chi-Ren Shyu is the chairman of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and director of the University of Missouri Informatics Institute. He holds the Paul K. and Dianne Shumaker Endowed Professorship of Biomedical Informatics. Since joining MU in 2000, Shyu has received several awards including the National Science Foundation CAREER award, Engineering Faculty Research Award, Engineering Teaching Excellence Award, the 2014 University of Missouri Faculty Entrepreneurial Award and seven computer science teaching awards. He actively serves the international research community, which includes organizing the IEEE HealthCom 2011 conference in Columbia as general chair, co-chairing technical program committee of the Second IEEE International Conference on Multimedia Big Data (BigMM2016) in Taipei, Taiwan, and organizing the IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM 2017) in Kansas City, Mo., as general chair. His research interests include massive data analytics, biomedical informatics, mHealth and eHealth, visual knowledge reasoning and search engine design. Project sponsors, in addition to the NSF, include the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Education, and other for-profit and nonprofit organizations.