Anna Koufakou

Dr. Anna Koufakou is a Professor in the Department of Computing & Software Engineering at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU), affiliated with the U.A. Whitaker College of Engineering. She joined FGCU in 2009 as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and has since advanced to full Professor. Her research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, text-based emotion recognition, and abusive language detection. She has also contributed to interdisciplinary projects involving solar panel data modeling and law enforcement data analysis.

Education: Dr. Koufakou holds a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from the University of Central Florida (2009), an M.S. in Computer Engineering (2000), and a B.S. in Informatics/Computer Science from Athens University of Economics and Business (1997).

Research Interests:

• Natural Language Processing (NLP)
• Machine Learning and Deep Learning
• Emotion Recognition in Text
• Offensive/Abusive Language Detection
• Data Mining and Anomaly Detection
• Cloud Computing Education

Her work spans diverse applications, from legal data analysis to cybersecurity. Notable contributions include the development of lexicon-enhanced models like HurtBERT for detecting abusive language. She has been recognized with a faculty research fellowship at Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) and awards from CRA-W for advancing women in computing research.

Teaching: She has designed and taught courses such as cloud computing and software engineering, emphasizing hands-on learning. Her educational initiatives include certification-guided cloud computing curricula and virtual reality-based programming education.

Labs/Teams: While no specific lab names are mentioned, her research collaborations involve interdisciplinary teams addressing NLP and data-driven challenges.