ASSISTANT DEAN, ACADEMIC AFFAIRS

Sharon A. Caraballo
Assistant Dean
Academic Affairs

Engineering Building, Room 5303

Phone: 703-993-1497

Dr. Sharon A. Caraballo is Assistant Dean for Academic Affairs in the Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering. Her responsibilities include marketing and recruitment for the Volgenau School's undergraduate programs, distance learning, enrollment analysis, and K-12 outreach. She is also one of the directors of the Commonwealth Graduate Engineering Program (CGEP), a distance learning consortium among Virginia's public universities with engineering schools, and in July 2008 will take over the role of State Chair of CGEP. She also serves on the Fairfax County Public Schools Career and Technical Education Advisory Committee.

Dr. Caraballo received her Ph.D. and Sc.M. degrees in computer science from Brown University, and her B.A. in computer science from Rutgers University, and is currently pursuing a Master of Science degree in Higher Education at Drexel University, with a concentration in Higher Education Administration and Organizational Management. She served as Clare Boothe Luce Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University before joining the faculty of George Mason University in 2004 as Associate Director of IT Undergraduate Programs. Dr. Caraballo was appointed Associate Chair of the Department of Applied Information Technology when the department was established in 2005. She currently holds the rank of Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Information Technology. She is an Associate Member of the Association of American Colleges and Universities as well as a member of the American Conference of Academic Deans. She is also a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, including its Special Interest Groups on Information Technology Education and Computer Science Education.

Her research in computer science was in the area of statistical natural language processing, looking at the question of what linguistic phenomena can be discovered using only a large text corpus. Her work has explored various facets of language learning, primarily focusing on learning semantic properties of nouns. In her dissertation work, she developed a method for automatically constructing a hypernym (or "IS-A") hierarchy of nouns using a large text corpus and no other sources of linguistic information. Prior to that, she worked on the problem of increasing the speed of statistical parsing methods by assigning an appropriate figure of merit to candidate constituents. She is currently interested in exploring the use of asynchronous distance learning in place of the traditional lecture format to teach technical material.