Diego Cifuentes is an Assistant Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. His research centers around the development of mathematical optimization methods, and the application of these methods in engineering areas such as machine learning, statistics, robotics, power systems, and computer vision. He also works in the theoretical analysis of optimization methods, leveraging geometric and combinatorial information to improve efficiency and robustness. Prior to joining ISyE, he served as an applied math instructor in MIT and as a postdoctoral researcher in the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences.

He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and his B.S. in Mathematics and B.S. in Electronics Engineering from Universidad de los Andes.

Dr. Ma received a B.S. degree in Automatic Control from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1998, a M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2000, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2003. 

After receiving her Ph.D., Ma joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Auburn University, where she served as an assistant professor until 2005. Since spring 2006, she has been with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Steven French is Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Veracyte.. He brings more than 20 years of information and operational leadership experience in the life sciences and technology industries to his role at Veracyte. 

Prior to joining Veracyte in July 2022, Mr. French most recently served as President of a consultancy advising leading biotech companies on information technology strategy, cybersecurity, acquisitions and infrastructure integration, and business operations. He previously served as Chief Information Officer at Celularity, a clinical-stage biotechnology company. Prior to that, Mr. French was Vice President of Technology Development at Human Longevity, Inc., a San Diego-based venture focused on building a comprehensive database of human genotypes and phenotypes, where he developed and implemented the infrastructure for key data management strategies. Earlier, Mr. French was Co-Founder and Vice President of Strategy and Technology at Epic Sciences, a diagnostics company focused on advancing the treatment and management of cancer, where he established key strategies for information technology, software development, and quality systems. 

Mr. French holds a B.B.A. and an M.B.A from the University of San Diego.

Surya Kalidindi is a Regents Professor, and Rae S. and Frank H. Neely Chair Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia, USA with joint appointments in the School of Materials Science and Engineering as well as the School of Computational Science and Engineering. Surya earned a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1992, and joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University as an Assistant Professor. After twenty years at Drexel University, Surya moved into his current position at Georgia Tech. Surya’s research efforts have made seminal contributions to the fields of crystal plasticity, microstructure design, and materials informatics. Surya has been elected a Fellow of ASM International, TMS, and ASME. In 2016, he and his group members have been awarded the top prize as well as one of the runner-up prizes in the national Materials Science and Engineering Data Challenge sponsored by the Air Force Research Lab in partnership with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. National Science Foundation. He has also been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, the Vannever Bush Faculty Fellow, the Government of India’s Vajra Faculty Award, and the Khan International Award.

Ada Gavrilovska is an Associate Professor at the College of Computing and a researcher with the Center for Experimental Research in Computer Systems (CERCS) at Georgia Tech. Her interests include experimental systems, focusing on operating systems, virtualization, and systems software for heterogeneous many-core platforms, emerging non-volatile memories, large scale datacenter and cloud systems, high-performance communication technologies and support for novel end-user devices and services. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, and industry grants, including from Cisco, HP, IBM, Intel, Intercontinental Exchange, LexisNexis, VMware, and others. She has published numerous book chapters, journal and conference publications, and edited a book “High Performance Communications: A Vertical Approach” (CRC Press, 2009). In addition to research, she also teaches courses on operating systems and high performance communications. She has a Bachelor's  in Computer Engineering from University Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Macedonia ('98), and a Master's ('99) and Ph.D. ('04) degrees in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.

Tushar Krishna is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. He also holds the ON Semiconductor Junior Professorship. He has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (2014), a M.S.E in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University (2009), and a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi (2007). Before joining Georgia Tech in 2015, Krishna spent a year as a researcher at the VSSAD group at Intel, Massachusetts.

Krishna’s research spans computer architecture, interconnection networks, networks-on-chip (NoC) and deep learning accelerators – with a focus on optimizing data movement in modern computing systems. Three of his papers have been selected for IEEE Micro’s Top Picks from Computer Architecture, one more received an honorable mention, and three have won best paper awards. He received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CRII award in 2018, a Google Faculty Award in 2019, and a Facebook Faculty Award in 2019 and 2020.

We are currently witnessing the birth of a new branch of astrophysics: high-energy astrophysics. With neutrinos we can study the high-energy Universe and peer into environments from where electromagnetic radiation can't escape. The IceCube neutrino observatory is a detector in operation at the geographic south pole. IceCube discovered, in 2013, an extragalactic flux of astrophysical neutrinos. Even though IceCube has identified two neutrino candidate sources: TXS 0506+056 (in 2018) and NGC 1068 (in 2022), the class of objects responsible for the astrophysical flux have not been unequivocally identified. Both these galaxies have Active Nuclei in which a supermassive black hole is being fed material via an accretion disk. Interestingly they are very different looking objects. TXS 0506+056 was seen with two flares of neutrinos and NGC 1068 is steady. TXS 0506+056 is seen mostly in ~50-200 TeV neutrinos, whereas NGC 1068 is seen in 1.5 to 15 TeV neutrinos. NGC 1068 is in our "neighboorhood" but TXS 0506+056 is very far away. 

The Taboada group uses IceCube data to search for astrophysical neutrino sources. Ignacio Taboada is the current spokesperson of the IceCube collaboration.

Dr. Hyesoon Kim received her Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include high-performance energy-efficient computer architectures, programmer-compiler-architecture interaction, low-power high-performance embedded processors, and compiler and hardware support for dynamic optimizations, virtual machines, and binary instrumentation.

Gongjie Li is currently an assistant professor at the School of Physics at Georgia Tech. Her research interests include dynamics of exoplanets, dynamics of compact objects as gravitational wave sources, and interactions between supermassive black holes and surrounding stars.