Dr. Stephen Balakirsky is the Chief Scientist for the Aerospace, Transportation & Advanced Systems Laboratory at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and the Director of Technical Initiatives at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at GT.

Dr. Balakirsky’s research interests include robotic architectures, planning, bio-automation, robotic standards, and autonomous systems testing. His work in knowledge driven robotics couples real-time sensors and knowledge repositories to allow for flexibility and agility in robotic systems ranging from assembly and manufacturing systems to surveillance and logistics systems. The framework promotes software reuse and the ability to detect and correct for execution errors.

Previously, Dr. Balakirsky worked as a project manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and was a senior research engineer at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL). At ARL, Dr. Balakirsky performed mobile robotics research in several areas, including command and control, mapping, human-computer interfaces, target tracking, vision processing and tele-operated control.

Prof. AlRegib is currently the John and Marilu McCarty Chair Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His group is the Omni Lab for Intelligent Visual Engineering and Science (OLIVES) at Georgia Tech. In 2012, he was named the Director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Energy and Geo Processing (CeGP). He is the director of the Center for Signal and Information Processing (CSIP). He also served as the Director of Georgia Tech’s Initiatives and Programs in MENA between 2015 and 2018. He has authored and co-authored more than 300 articles in international journals and conference proceedings. He has been issued several U.S. patents and invention disclosures. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Prof. AlRegib received the ECE Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award in 2001 and both the CSIP Research and the CSIP Service Awards in 2003. In 2008, he received the ECE Outstanding Junior Faculty Member Award. In 2017, he received the 2017 Denning Faculty Award for Global Engagement. He and his students received the Beat Paper Award in ICIP 2019. He received the 2024 ECE Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award at Georgia Tech. He and his students received the Best Paper Award in ICIP 2019 and the 2023 EURASIP Best Paper Award for Image communication Journal.

Prof. AlRegib participated in a number of activities. He has served as Technical Program co-Chair for ICIP 2020 and ICIP 2024. He served two terms as a member of the IEEE SPS Technical Committees on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) and Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP), 2015-2017 and 2018-2020. He was a member of the Editorial Boards of both the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP), 2009-2022, and the Elsevier Journal Signal Processing: Image Communications, 2014-2022. He was a member of the editorial board of the Wireless Networks Journal (WiNET), 2009-2016 and the IEEE Transaction on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (CSVT), 2014-2016. He was an Area Chair for ICME 2016/17 and the Tutorial Chair for ICIP 2016. He served as the chair of the Special Sessions Program at ICIP’06, the area editor for Columns and Forums in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (SPM), 2009–12, the associate editor for IEEE SPM, 2007-09, the Tutorials co-chair in ICIP’09, a guest editor for IEEE J-STSP, 2012, a track chair in ICME’11, the co-chair of the IEEE MMTC Interest Group on 3D Rendering, Processing, and Communications, 2010-12, the chair of the Speech and Video Processing Track at Asilomar 2012, and the Technical Program co-Chair of IEEE GlobalSIP, 2014. He lead a team that organized the IEEE VIP Cup, 2017 and the 2023 IEEEE VIP Cup. He delivered short courses and several tutorials at international events such as BigData, NeurIPS, ICIP, ICME, CVPR, AAAI, and WACV.

In the Omni Lab for Intelligent Visual Engineering and Science (OLIVES), he and his group work on robust and interpretable machine learning algorithms, uncertainty and trust, and human in the loop algorithms. The group studies interventions into AI systems to enhance their trustworthiness. The group has demonstrated their work on a wide range of applications such as Autonomous Systems, Medical Imaging, and Subsurface Imaging. The group is interested in advancing the fundamentals as well as the deployment of such systems in real-world scenarios. His research group is working on projects related to machine learning, image and video processing, image and video understanding, subsurface imaging, perception in visual data processing, healthcare intelligence, and video analytics. The primary applications of the research span from Autonomous Vehicles to Portable AI-based Ophthalmology and Eye Exam and from Microscopic Imaging to Seismic Interpretation. The group was the first to introduce modern machine learning to seismic interpretation.

In 2024, and after more than three years of continuous work, he co-founded Georgia Tech’s AI Makerspace. The AI Makerspace is a resource for the entire campus community to access AI. Its purpose is to democratize access to AI. Together with his team, they are developing tools and services for the AI Makerspace via a VIP Team called AI Makerspace Nexus. In addition, he created two AI classes from scratch with innovative hands-on exercises using the AI Makerspace. One class is the ECE4252/8803 FunML class (Fundamentals of Machine Learning) where students learn the basics of Machine Learning as well as eight weeks of Deep learning both mathematically and using hands-on exercises on real-world data. The second class is a sophomore-level AI Foundations class (AI First) that teaches any student from any college the basics of AI such as data literacy, learning, decision, planning, and ethics using theory and hands-on exercises on the AI Makerspace. Prof. AlRegib wrote two textbooks for both classes.

Prof. AlRegib has provided services and consultation to several firms, companies, and international educational and R&D organizations. He has been a witness expert in a number of patents infringement cases and Inter Partes Review (IRP) cases.

Dr. Aidun joined the Woodruff School as a Professor in 2003 after completion of a two-year period as program director at the National Science Foundation. He began at Tech in 1988 as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Paper Science and Technology. Prior, he was a research Scientist at Battelle Research Laboratories, Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University and Senior Research Consultant at the National Science Foundation's Supercomputer Center at Cornell. 

Dr. Aidun's research is at the intersection between fundamentals of the physics of complex fluids/thermal transport and applications to engineering and biotransport. He has a diverse research portfolio in fluid mechanics, bioengineering, renewable bioproducts and decarbonization of industrial processes. 

A major focus has been to understand the physics of blood cell transport and interaction with glycoproteins (e.g., vWF) with applications to cardiovascular diseases.

Itamar Kolvin received his B.Sc. (2007) in Physics and Mathematics and his M.Sc. (2009) from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 2017, he completed his Ph.D. in Physics under Prof. Jay Fineberg in the Hebrew University. He was a HFSP cross-disciplinary postdoctoral fellow in the Physics Department, University of California, Santa Barbara with Pro. Zvonimir Dogic. His research interests are in the fundamentals of soft matter out-of-equilibrium: assembly, deformation, flow and fracture. Current efforts make use of model systems that are assembled of protein machineries to investigate active and adaptive material mechanics.