George Lan is an A. Russell Chandler III Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology.  His research and teaching interests lie in theory, algorithms and applications of stochastic optimization and nonlinear programming.  Most of his current research concerns the design of efficient algorithms for solving challenging optimization problems, especially those arising from data analytics, machine learning, and reinforcement learning. He is actively pursuing the applications of these methodologies in healthcare and sustainability areas. Dr. Lan serves as the associate editor for Computational Optimization and Applications (2014 – present), Mathematical Programming (2016 – present) and SIAM Journal on Optimization (2016  – present). Dr. Lan is an associate director for the center of machine learning at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Gari Clifford is a tenured Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics (BMI) at Emory. His research focuses on the application of signal processing and machine learning to medicine to classify, track and predict health and illness. His focus research areas include critical care, digital psychiatry, global health, mHealth, neuroinformatics and perinatal health. After training in Theoretical Physics, he transitioned to AI and Engineering for his doctorate (DPhil) at the University of Oxford in the 1990’s. He subsequently joined MIT as a postdoctoral fellow, then Principal Research Scientist where he managed the creation of the MIMIC II database, the largest open access critical care database in the world. He later returned as an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering to Oxford, where he helped found its Sleep & Circadian Neuroscience Institute and served as Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Healthcare Innovation at the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering. As Chair, Dr Clifford has established BMI as a leading center for critical care and mHealth informatics, and as a champion for open access data and open source software in medicine, particularly through his leadership of the PhysioNet/CinC Challenges and contributions to the PhysioNet Resource. Despite this, he is a strong supporter of commercial translation, working closely with industry, and serves as CTO of MindChild Medical, a spin out from his research at MIT.

Whether we’re driving a car, cooking dinner, performing a psychology experiment, or even watching television, we’re performing goal-directed behavior. We must keep track of our current goal (e.g., to cook dinner), so that we do not execute responses inappropriate for the present situation (e.g., sitting down to watch television). Yet, we must also flexibly adapt our goals to changing situations. For example, we must override our “cooking” goal with an “answering” one when we hear the doorbell ring. My research focuses on the mental processes required to carry out these and other types of goal-directed behavior.

A complicated set of mental processes are involved in behaviors like these. In addition to maintaining and updating our goals, we must attend to relevant stimuli, store relevant information in memory, and select and execute appropriate responses. What is the nature of these processes? How do they interact? What are their limitations? How do they change with training? And what are the neural mechanisms underlying them? These are the types of questions I investigate using a variety of experimental techniques: including behavioral testing, functional neuroimaging, and magnetic stimulation.

Edwin Romeijn is the H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

His areas of expertise include optimization theory and applications. His recent research activities deal with issues arising in radiation therapy treatment planning and supply chain management. In radiation therapy treatment planning, his main goal has been to develop new models and algorithms for efficiently determining effective treatment plans for cancer patients who are treated using radiation therapy, and treatment schedules for radiation therapy clinics. In supply chain optimization, his main interests are in the integrated optimization of production, inventory, and transportation processes, in particular in the presence of demand flexibility, limited resources, perishability, and uncertainty.

He previously served as Program Director for the Manufacturing Enterprise Systems, Service Enterprise Systems, and Operations Research programs at the National Science Foundation, and as Professor and Richard C. Wilson Faculty Scholar in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. Before joining the University of Michigan in 2008, he was on the faculty of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Florida and the Rotterdam School of Management at the Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands. 

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) and the Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers (IISE), and a member of the Mathematical Optimization Society (MOS), Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM).

Dr. Diana Hicks is a Professor in the School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology specializing in metrics for science and technology policy. She was the first author on the Leiden Manifesto for research metrics published in Nature, which has been translated into 24 languages and won the 2016 Ziman award of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) for collaborative promotion of public interaction with science and technology. Her work has informed policymakers in the U.S., Europe and Japan. She has advised the OECD, Flanders, the Czech Republic, and Sweden on national research evaluation systems. She chaired the School of Public Policy for 10 years and currently co-chairs the international Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy and has been an editor of Research Evaluation. Prof. Hicks has also taught at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; SPRU, University of Sussex, and worked at NISTEP in Tokyo. She earned her D.Phil and M.Sc. from SPRU, University of Sussex. In 2018 she was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for “distinguished contributions to the evaluation of national and international research and development enterprises, and for outstanding leadership in science and technology policy education.”

Dana Randall is an American computer scientist. She works as the ADVANCE Professor of Computing, and adjunct professor of mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is also an External Professor of the Santa Fe Institute. Previously she was executive director of the Georgia Tech Institute of Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) that she co-founded, and director of the Algorithms and Randomness Center. Her research include combinatorics, computational aspects of statistical mechanics, Monte Carlo stimulation of Markov chains, and randomized algorithms.

Craig Tovey is a Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. He also co-directs CBID, the Georgia Tech Center for Biologically Inspired Design. 

Dr. Tovey's principal research and teaching activities are in operations research and its interdisciplinary applications to social and natural systems, with emphasis on sustainability, the environment, and energy. His current research concerns inverse optimization for electric grid management, classical and biomimetic algorithms for robots and webhosting, the behavior of animal groups, sustainability measurement, and political polarization.  

Dr. Tovey received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 and the 1989 Jacob Wolfowitz Prize for research in heuristics. He was granted a Senior Research Associateship from the National Research Council in 1990, was named an Institute Fellow at Georgia Tech in 1994, and received the Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activity Award in 2011. In 2016, Dr. Tovey was recognized by the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce with the Test of Time Award for his work as co-author of the paper “How Hard Is It to Control an Election?” He was a 2016 Golden Goose Award recipient for his role on an interdisciplinary team that studied honey bee foraging behavior which led to the development of the Honey Bee Algorithm to allocate shared webservers to internet traffic. 

Dr. Tovey received an A.B. in applied mathematics from Harvard College in 1977 and both an M.S. in computer science and a Ph.D. in operations research from Stanford University in 1981. 

Chao Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the School of Computational Science and Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. His research area is data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing. His research aims to enable machines to understand text data in more label-efficient and robust way in open-world settings. Specific research topics include weakly-supervised learning, out-of-distribution generalization, interpretable machine learning, and knowledge extraction and reasoning. He is a recipient of Google Faculty Research Award, Amazon AWA Machine Learning Research Award, ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Runner-up Award, IMWUT distinguished paper award, and ECML/PKDD Best Student Paper Runner-up Award. Before joining Georgia Tech, he obtained his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2018.

Devi Parikh is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, and a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). From 2013 to 2016, she was an Assistant Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech. From 2009 to 2012, she was a Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), an academic computer science institute affiliated with University of Chicago. She has held visiting positions at Cornell University, University of Texas at Austin, Microsoft Research, MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Facebook AI Research. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and 2009 respectively. She received her B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rowan University in 2005. Her research interests include computer vision and AI in general and visual recognition problems in particular. Her recent work involves exploring problems at the intersection of vision and language, and leveraging human-machine collaboration for building smarter machines. She has also worked on other topics such as ensemble of classifiers, data fusion, inference in probabilistic models, 3D reassembly, barcode segmentation, computational photography, interactive computer vision, contextual reasoning, hierarchical representations of images, and human-debugging.

Matt is a former Tar Heel from UNC Chapel Hill. His training is in mass spectrometry-based proteomics and G protein signaling. He has been investigating PTMs since 2001. He is also a co-director of the Systems Mass Spectrometry Core (SYMS-C) facility at Georgia Tech.