Michael Fudge

Overview

Michael Fudge is a Professor of Practice in the School of Information Studies. His areas of study center around digital transformation and the impact of information technology on society. Michael’s emphasis is on how the systems, software, data and technical architectures contribute to the transformation of organizational models and processes which affect our everyday lives. These factors are observed through the lens of scalability, security, automation and ethical uses of the information collected by these systems.

Professor Fudge has a keen interest in the improvement of teaching and learning using information technology, data, data science, and AI. In 2021 he won the Meredith Teaching Excellence Award for his commitment to innovative teaching practices, and in 2022 was named the Jeffrey Katzer Professor of the year.

Professor Fudge believes that programming is a 21st century literacy skill which should be taught as part of the digital humanities. No discipline is immune from technology disruption; therefore, stakeholders need to understand these systems and keep a balanced perspective over their appropriate use. For programming, this implies understanding how to leverage technology to solve-domain specific information problems. The idea is for the student to be aware of the capabilities and limitations of technology through code and be able to think systematically.

As the Faculty advisor for the NEXIS (New Explorations in Information Sciences) Lab, Fudge mentors students as they design their own independent study projects. These projects explore, research, and experiment with impactful or emerging technologies like deep learning, artificial intelligence, virtual / augmented reality, Internet of things, cloud computing, and 3D printing – many subjects for which he also shares a passion. As a member of the Center for Emerging Network Technologies Lab (CENT), he studies the technology infrastructures necessary to support digital transformation such as hybrid clouds, Kubernetes, NoSQL, and Internet of things. The JupyterHub cluster Professor Fudge uses in his IST256 course is a byproduct of his research activity in CENT. Hundreds of students use the cluster annually to learn programming in Python.

In 1993, Fudge received his bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from the State University of New York at Oswego. He completed his master’s degree in Information Management from the Syracuse University School of Information Studies in 2006. Michael brings into the classroom over 25 years of career experience, and 20 years of teaching experience. He has extensive depth of knowledge in databases/data warehouses, systems administration and software development. He teaches courses that compliment his expertise in Python programing, databases, data warehousing, NoSQL, and Cloud, and became an AWS Educate Cloud Ambassador in 2020.

Most recently, he finished a book titled, “Applied Database Management” where he shares his database design and SQL programming expertise. Michael is a one-third partner in his company, Apphammer. At present the company is using their expertise to simplify how websites are built and maintained, and discovered by search engines.

Michael enjoys giving technical talks. When he is not sharing his experience or discoveries in person, he is posting to YouTube! https://www.youtube.com/michaelfudge, where he has over 30 thousand followers. Professor Fudge gets outdoors. He enjoys hiking, skiing or kayaking with his wife, two sons, and dog, Luna when he needs a break from tinkering with the latest technologies.