Dragutin Petkovic

Prof. D. Petkovic obtained his PhD at UC Irvine, in the area of biomedical image processing. He spent over 15 years at IBM Almaden Research Center as a scientist and in various management roles. His contributions ranged from use of computer vision for inspection, to multimedia and content management systems. He is the founder of IBM's well-known QBIC (query by image content) project, which significantly influenced the content-based retrieval field. Prof. Petkovic received numerous IBM awards for his work and became an IEEE Fellow in 1998 and IEEE LIFE Fellow in 2018 for leadership in content-based retrieval area. In 2003 Prof. Petkovic joined CS Department as a Chair (from 2003 to 2016) and founded SFSU Center for Computing for Life Sciences in 2005. He led the establishment of SFSU Graduate Certificate in AI Ethics, jointly with SFSU Schools of Business and Philosophy.  Research and teaching interests of Prof. Petkovic include AI and Machine Learning with emphasis on Explainability, Ethics and Trustworthiness, GenAI in education, and the design and development of easy to use systems. He is also Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society.

• Ethical and trustworthy AI
• Explainable AI
• User centered design and UX
• Practical SW engineering

• Ethical and trustworthy AI
• Explainable AI 
• Usability and computer user interface

• UC Irvine, PhD in Electrical Engineering (1983)

• Prof. Emeritus, CS Deportment, SFSU (since 2025)
• Prof, CS Department, SFSU (2015-2025)
• Founder and one of the three faculty in charge of SFSU Graduate Certificate in AI Ethics (since 2019)
• Director, SFSU Center for Computing for Life Sciences (2005-2018)
• Prof. and Chair, CS Department, SFSU (2003-2015)

• IEEE Life Fellow (2018)
• IEEE Fellow (1998)

• A.Chaudhuri , D.Petkovic: "Issues and Concerns About GenAI and How We Can Smartly Use It in Education", in Vol. 5 No. 1: Proceedings of the 2025 AAAI Spring Symposium Series, March 2025

• D. Petkovic, "It is Not "Accuracy vs. Explainability"—We Need Both for Trustworthy AI Systems," in IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 46-53, March 2023, doi: 10.1109/TTS.2023.3239921.

• C. Montemayor, D. Kleinrichert, D. Petkovic: "San Francisco State University Graduate Certificate in Ethical AI – overview and early experiences", AAAI Symposium, Session on "Socially Responsible AI for Well-being", March 2023, San Francisco (best session speaker award for D. Petkovic)

• Petkovic D., Alavi A., Cai D., Wong M. "Random Forest Model and Sample Explainer for Non-experts in Machine Learning – Two Case Studies." In: Del Bimbo A. et al. (eds) Pattern Recognition. ICPR International Workshops and Challenges. ICPR 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 12663. Springer, Cham.