Dhruv Batra is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. His research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, natural language processing, and AI, with a focus on developing intelligent systems that are able to concisely summarize their beliefs about the world with diverse predictions, integrate information and beliefs across different sub-components or `modules' of AI (vision, language, reasoning, dialog), and interpretable AI systems that provide explanations and justifications for why they believe what they believe. In past, he has also worked on topics such as interactive co-segmentation of large image collections, human body pose estIMaTion, action recognition, depth estIMaTion, and distributed optimization for inference and learning in probabilistic graphical models. He is a recipient of the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award (2016), the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award (2014), Army Research Office (ARO) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award (2014), Virginia Tech College of Engineering Outstanding New Assistant Professor award (2015), two Google Faculty Research Awards (2013, 2015), Amazon Academic Research award (2016), Carnegie Mellon Dean's Fellowship (2007), and several best paper awards (EMNLP 2017, ICML workshop on Visualization for Deep Learning 2016, ICCV workshop Object Understanding for Interaction 2016) and teaching commendations at Virginia Tech. His research is supported by NSF, ARO, ARL, ONR, DARPA, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA. Research from his lab has been extensively covered in the media (with varying levels of accuracy) at CNN, BBC, CNBC, Bloomberg Business, The Boston Globe, MIT Technology Review, Newsweek, The Verge, New Scientist, and NPR. From 2013-2016, he was an Assistant Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he led the VT Machine Learning & Perception group and was a member of the Virginia Center for Autonomous Systems (VaCAS) and the VT Discovery Analytics Center (DAC). From 2010-2012, he was a Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), a philanthropically endowed academic computer science institute located on the University of Chicago campus. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and 2010 respectively, advised by Tsuhan Chen. In past, he has held visiting positions at the Machine Learning Department at CMU, CSAIL MIT, Microsoft Research, and Facebook AI Research.

Dr. Dellaert does research in the areas of robotics and computer vision, which present some of the most exciting challenges to anyone interested in artificial intelligence. He is especially keen on Bayesian inference approaches to the difficult inverse problems that keep popping up in these areas. In many cases, exact solutions to these problems are intractable, and as such he is interested in examining whether Monte Carlo (sampling-based) approxIMaTions are applicable in those cases.

Russ Clark is the director of sustainability and a senior research scientist in Georgia Tech's Institute for People and Technology, who engages hundreds of students each semester in mobile development, networking, and the Internet of Things. He is the CEAR Hub lead principal investigator. He emphasizes innovation, entrepreneurship, and industry involvement in student projects and application development. He was formerly the co-director of the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center (GT-RNOC), which supported research efforts across campus, and principal leader of the Convergence Innovation Competition, which pairs students and industry sponsors on novel projects. He has played a leadership role in the NSF GENI project, leading both the GT campus trials efforts as well as the GENI@SoX regional deployment and the Software-Defined Exchange (SDX). Russ is active in the startup community, including roles with the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps program and as a principle with Empire Technologies during its acquisition by Concord Communications.

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. I received my Ph.D. and B.S. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and held positions as a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Media Lab and as Assistant Professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute prior to joining Georgia Tech. I direct the Robot Autonomy and Interactive Learning (RAIL) lab, where we work on developing robots that are able to effectively operate in human environments. My research interests span robotics and artificial intelligence, including semantic reasoning, adjustable autonomy, human computation and cloud robotics. Please visit the RAIL lab website for a description of our latest projects.

Duen Horng "Polo" Chau, Ph.D., is a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering, and an Associate Director of the MS Analytics program. He holds a Ph.D. and Master's in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University, where his doctoral thesis won CMU’s Computer Science Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention. Chau has received faculty awards from Google, Yahoo, and LexisNexis. He also received the Raytheon Faculty Fellowship, Edenfield Faculty Fellowship, Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. He is the only two-time Symantec fellow and an award-winning designer. Chau’s research lab  -- the Polo Club of Data Science -- bridges data mining and HCI to solve large-scale, real-world problems by developing scalable, interactive, and interpretable tools for big data analytics. The group's "Polonium" malware detection technology (patented with Symantec) protects 120 million people worldwide. Its auction fraud detection research was widely covered by media, and its fake-review-detection research received the “Best Student Paper” award at the 2014 SIAM Data Mining Conference. Other work has addressed content spam, insider trading, and unauthorized mobile device access. He co-organized the IDEA workshop series at KDD that facilitate cross-pollination across HCI and data mining. He served as general chair for ACM IUI 2015 and was a steering committee member of the conference.

M. Elizabeth (Liz) Azukas is a Senior Research Associate with the Georgia Tech Research Institute and an affiliate faculty member with the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). Her work sits at the intersection of learning, human-centered technology, and systems change. Drawing on experience as an education leader, university faculty member, and private-sector strategist, Dr. Azukas focuses on how emerging technologies, particularly AI, interactive simulations, and digital learning systems, can strengthen human decision-making, expand professional learning opportunities, and support more equitable and sustainable educational ecosystems.

Dr. Azukas is the co-developer of the DOT Framework (Design + Open Systems Theory), a socio-technical model that guides purposeful, human-centered integration of AI into learning environments. She is currently leading efforts to operationalize DOT into an interactive AI coaching system designed to improve metacognition, reflection, and complex decision-making among education professionals. Her applied research portfolio also includes the design and study of simulation-based learning experiences, including mixed-reality and AI-generated simulations that promote active learning, feedback-rich practice, and systems thinking.

Across her career, Dr. Azukas has blended research and practice to design digital, hybrid, and competency-based learning initiatives in K-12 districts, higher education, and international contexts. Before joining GTRI, she served as an assistant superintendent, director of curriculum, and principal in virtual and traditional school systems, and later as an associate professor of educational leadership and instructional design technology. She has also worked in the private sector in roles spanning strategic planning, learning and development, project management, and product innovation. These experiences inform her ability to bridge research, design, and implementation across diverse organizational environments.

Dr. Azukas' scholarship examines digital leadership, personalized and online learning, simulation-based preparation, human-AI collaboration, and the future of professional learning systems. She has served as principal investigator on multiple projects involving simulations, AI-enhanced learning, robotic telepresence, and digital leadership, and her work appears in journals and edited volumes in AI in education, instructional design, and leadership studies.

She brings to IPaT a dual commitment to technological innovation and the human dimensions of learning, exploring how thoughtfully designed systems can empower learners, leaders, and professionals across sectors, expand access to meaningful learning experiences, and support more adaptive and resilient organizations.

Carl DiSalvo is an Professor in the Digital Media Program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech he directs the Public Design Workshop: a design research studio that explores socially engaged design and civic media. 

DiSalvo is also co-director of the Digital Interdisciplinary Liberal Arts Center and its Digital Civics initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation, and he leads the Serve-Learn-Sustain Fellows program, which brings together faculty, staff, students, and community partners to explore pressing social research themes (the 2016-2017 themes are Smart Cities and Food, Energy, Water, Systems). He has a courtesy appointment in the School of Interactive Computing and is an affiliate of the GVU Center and the Center for Urban Innovation.  DiSalvo also coordinates the Digital Media track of the interdisciplinary M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction. 

DiSalvo’s scholarship draws together theories and methods from design research and design studies, the social sciences, and the humanities, to analyze the social and political qualities of design, and to prototype experimental systems and services. Current research domains include civics, smart cities, the Internet of Things, food systems, and environmental monitoring. Across these domains, DiSalvo is interested in how practices of participatory and public design work to articulate issues and provide resources for new forms of collective action.  

Areas of Expertise:

• Civic Media
• Design
• Design Studies
• Digital Civics
• Food Systems
• Public And Civic IoT
• Smart Cities

Richard DeMillo is the Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Professor of Computing at Georgia Tech. He was formerly the John P. Imlay Dean of Computing. Positions he has held prior to joining Georgia Tech include: Chief Technology Officer for Hewlett-Packard, Vice President of Computing Research for Bell Communications Research, Director of the Computer Research Division for the National Science Foundation, and Director of the Software Test and Evaluation Project for the Office of the US Secretary of Defense. He has also held faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin, Purdue University and the University of Padua, Italy. His research includes over 100 articles, books and patents in algorithms, software and computer engineering, cryptography, and cyber security. In 1982, he wrote the first policy for testing software intensive systems for the US Department of Defense. DeMillo and his collaborators launched and developed the field of program mutation for software testing. He is a co-inventor of Differential Fault Cryptanalysis and holds what is believed to be the only patent on breaking public key cryptosystems. He currently works in the area of election and voting system security. His work has been cited in court cases, including a 2019 Federal Court decision declaring unconstitutional the use of paperless voting machines. He has served as a foreign election observer for the Carter Center and is a member of the State of Michigan Election Security Commission. He has served on boards of public and private cybersecurity and privacy companies, including RSA Security and SecureWorks. He has served on many non-profit and philanthropic boards including the Exploratorium and the Campus Community Partnership Foundation (formerly the Rosalind and Jimmy Carter Foundation). He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2010, he founded the Center for 21st Century Universities, Georgia Tech’s living laboratory for fundamental change in higher education. He served as Executive Director for ten years. He was named Lumina Foundation Fellow for his work in higher education. His 2015 book Revolution in Higher Education, published by MIT Press, won the Best Education Book award from the American Association of Publishers and helped spark a national conversation about online education.  He co-chaired Georgia Tech’s Commission on Creating the Next in Education.  The Commission’s report was released in 2018. He received the ANAK Society’s Outstanding Faculty Member Award.

Dr. Yeo holds the titles of G.P. "Bud" Peterson and Valerie H. Peterson Endowed Professor, as well as Harris Saunders Jr. Endowed Professor, in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. He is also the director of the Wearable Intelligent Systems and Healthcare Center (WISH Center) and the KIAT-Georgia Tech Semiconductor Electronics Center (K-GTSEC). Dr. Yeo's research focuses on understanding the fundamentals of soft materials, deformable mechanics, interfacial physics, manufacturing, and the integration of hard and soft materials for the development of biomedical systems. He earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and genome sciences from the University of Washington in Seattle and subsequently worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With over 180 peer-reviewed publications, Dr. Yeo has contributed to many prestigious journals, including Nature Materials, Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications, and Science Advances. He is an IEEE Senior Member and has received numerous awards, including the Visiting Professorship from the Institute Jean Lamour at the Université de Lorraine in France, the Lucy G. Moses Lectureship Award at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, the NIH Trailblazer Young Investigator Award, the IEEE Outstanding Engineer Award, the Emory School of Medicine Research Award, the Imlay Innovation Award, the American Heart Association Innovative Project Award, the Sensors Young Investigator Award, the Med-X Young Investigator Award, and the Outstanding Service Award from the Korea Institute for Advancement of Technology, as well as the Outstanding Yonsei Scholar Award. Dr. Yeo is also the founder of two startup companies: Huxley Medical, Inc. and WisMedical, Inc.

Alex Adams’s research focuses on designing, fabricating, and implementing new ubiquitous and wearable sensing systems. In particular, he is interested in how to develop these systems using equity-driven design principles for healthcare. Alex leverages sensing, signal processing, and fabrication techniques to design, deploy, and evaluate novel sensing technologies.

Originally a musician, Alex became fascinated by how he could capture and manipulate sounds through analog hardware and digital signal processing, which led him back to his hometown (Concord, NC). Alex completed his BS at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2014 and his Ph.D. at Cornell University in 2021 (advised by Professor Tanzeem Choudhury). Alex then became the resident Research Scientist for the Precision Behavioral Health Initiative at Cornell Tech (NYC) until the fall of 2022, when he joined the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Currently, his research focuses on the equity-driven design and the development of multi-modal sensing systems to simultaneously assess mental and physical health to enable a new class of mobile health technologies.