Charles Isbell, Jr. joins UW-Madison as second-in-command

Isbell, who was born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but considers himself an Atlanta native after moving there at age 3, is decorating his new UW-Madison office with relics of his life’s work — a large frame plotting out interactions in an online social communication experiment he designed; autographed photos of his Georgia Tech Ph.D. students wearing the same Funkadelic-style music hat and glasses, an ode to his former research group, named pfunk, and his love of funkadelic music.

He keeps fuzzy rearview mirror dice in a cabinet, the same ones he gave his Ph.D. students when they pass their dissertations, because they represented probabilistic function and “nothing is funkier.”

Isbell, who has spent his career researching human-based machine learning at AT&T Labs and Georgia Tech, joined UW-Madison as its new provost Aug. 1. As the chief academic officer overseeing all educational programs and faculty, the provost often is considered to be a university’s No. 2 official, behind the chancellor.

Isbell succeeds former provost Karl Scholz, who announced his intention to return to the Department of Economics faculty last winter before being hired as University of Oregon’s next president.

Most recently the dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, Isbell brings with him a plethora of research and administrative experience, made possible as he juggled his professorships with associate dean responsibilities. A decorated computer scientist, Isbell is credited for launching Georgia Tech’s online computer science master’s degree program and founded the Constellations Center for Equity in Computing, a program connecting K-12 students of all backgrounds to a computer science education.

Isbell knew as young as 8 1/2 that building computers and researching machine learning was what he wanted to do — even if he didn’t have the words to describe artificial intelligence.

“I was driven by science fiction and reading comic books,” he said. “The idea of building a thing that was smart and that did what I asked it to do, that really drove me to computing and it drove me to AI and machine learning.”

Outside of his research work, Isbell is still a collector of comic books — with 23,000 in his collection — a hip hop connoisseur who at one point ran an online awards show and an avid ultimate frisbee player. He’s a father of two, with his daughter following his footsteps attending Georgia Tech and a son who’s deeply interested in history.

The Wisconsin State Journal sat down with Isbell last week to talk about his new role and vision for the university.

Responses have been edited for length.

What UW Madison has going for it, among other things, is that it is a broad university. It has an (Education) school, a pharmacy school, has a med school, has a law school, has engineering. It touches every aspect of the sorts of things that we want to do in education and has excellence in almost all of the things that you can imagine that sort of matter for educating people, for the things that are going to be underlying the solutions, that are going to deal with the large problems that we’re all going to be facing over the next couple of decades.

This is one of the small number of places, I believe, that both embraces its public mission on the one hand, but also has the potential to shape the solutions to those problems, large (and) broad, and it’s willing to do some interesting things. And insofar as it is willing to take calculated risks, and to take seriously the stuff that it can do, the things that it can do, this is the kind of place where I want to be.

How do you reach more and more people and bring them into the conversation? How do you make certain that they’re educated in a way that allows them to be good citizens? How do you respect their particular histories and experiences and allow them to bring that to a place like this, so that we’re all richer for the experiences? That’s not easy — it’s easier said than done, for sure. But it’s fundamentally important. We all learn from different experiences that different people have. This is what diversity is, this is what it means, to bring a variety of voices in experiences, backgrounds, desires, goals, and it transforms the people who are here.

There’s also a kind of separate problem, which is the world is moving ridiculously fast — far faster than human beings can kind of think about. There’s all these things about technology, all these things that are kind of being disrupted. And it’s not just the people who are 19 years old you have to worry about, it’s the ones who are 45, 55, who have to come back to retrain, to relearn. So, this is a question not just of “How do you educate the people who are going to be here?”, but “How do you make certain you’re supporting all the ones who will never be here or the ones who are going to need to come back later?” That’s the conversation that we have to have, in the face of rapidly changing demographics. And in the face of a questioning citizenry who want to understand what the university is doing for it.

First off, the growth is going to happen whether I’m here or not. And that’s because that kind of technology and way of thinking is beginning to permeate not just, you know, what you do for living, but also the way research is done, the way questions are asked and the way scholarship is pursued … . You’re going to use these tools in order to do analysis of data that would have been impossible to do in any one person’s lifetime. And from that, you will be able to build insights into who we were and who we’re going to be.

And so, it’s not that computing, as I tend to think of it, is more important than anything else — because you’re also talking to someone who minored in Spanish, history and cognitive science — but it is central to the way that we were able to ask questions that we otherwise would not have been able to ask. And recognizing that is no more radical than recognizing that electricity matters or that having transportation matters or clothing matters or anything else that enables us to do things more efficiently and to do things in a sort of broader way. So, I’m hoping that way of thinking about the world, to go the way of thinking philosophically but also a way of thinking in terms of intellectual pursuits, is something that I can help to encourage and support, whatever the discipline happens to be.

Our backgrounds are different in terms of the specific experiences we had, in terms of the way we did scholarship and kind of education we have. She’s a lawyer — I listen to podcasts by lawyers — but we’re also very similar in that we care about these larger questions around the purpose of higher education, where it sits. And so, I think we’ll be able to work together to make that happen. What she has is an appreciation for the mission of the public university. I think she believes in those kinds of ideas. I know that I do, and I think that with that, you can kind of move from here to there. And I will say that we know both as a matter of our own personal experience, but also the literature tells us, that you want a diverse set of experiences and backgrounds and interests, and that gets you to the best possible outcome. And this university is full of that.