Celeste Mason is a research scientist II at the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). After completing her Masters of Human-Computer Interaction at Georgia Tech (and previously, a Bachelor’s in Materials Science and Engineering), she worked as a researcher/developer at a wearable computing startup and universities in Northern Germany. Research projects included design and development of technologies for intelligent assistance in physical training for older adults, with an emphasis on realistic intelligent virtual agents and dynamic user feedback; creation of a multi-modal dataset for action recognition and semantic/hierarchical structure discovery, with the goal of enhancing cognitive robotic planning algorithms; user interfaces, wearable, and tangible systems for the “Workflow Editor” graphical procedural customization system for order-picking and other industrial processes (now part of Teamviewer); and the collaborative research projects “Multimodal Algebra Lernen (MAL)”, a tangible mathematics educational system; and “Be-griefen”, an experimentation XR educational system for physics and electronics instruction.
 

Some of the projects Celeste has worked on at Georgia Tech include PopSign (an American Sign Language vocabulary learning mobile game - the initial prototype was the basis of her Masters project), along with the Passive Haptic Learning and Rehabilitation project (PHL/PHR Gloves help to teach the "muscle memory" of how to play piano melodies without the learner's active attention and may aid those recovering from stroke injury and other conditions improve sensation/dexterity in their affected hands), the FIDO project (tangible and wearable systems for working dogs), and the CHAT project (wearable computers used by dolphin researcher). Prior Materials Science research projects focused on design, fabrication, and characterization of piezo-electric nanogenerators, bio-inspired nanomaterials and optically transparent, electrically conductive nanoparticle/polymer composites. Her current research focuses include educational games, tools, and outreach (especially in the STEM space); assistive technologies for health, education and industry; environmental sensor systems for community-driven sustainability; and wearable (AR/XR) and implantable technologies for health, productivity, and quality-of-life/well-being. Celeste continues to pursue technology transfer efforts for these projects (PHL Gloves and PopSign in particular) with the goal of building up and refining these research prototypes toward viable products that can significantly improve and enrich users’ daily lives.

Research Interests:

• Educational and behavior-change technologies, serious games
• Wearables/XR, multimodal interaction
• Assistive technologies
• Sustainability in computing

 

Yanni Loukissas is an Associate Professor of Digital Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. His research is focused on helping creative professionals think critically about the social implications of emerging technologies. His forthcoming book, All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society (MIT Press, 2019), is addressed to a growing audience of practitioners who want to work with unfamiliar sources both effectively and ethically. He is also the author of Co-Designers: Cultures of Computer Simulation in Architecture (Routledge, 2012) and a contributor to Simulation and its Discontents (MIT Press, 2009). Before coming to Georgia Tech, he was a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he co-coordinated the Program in Art, Design and the Public Domain. He was also a principal at metaLAB, a research project of the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He has taught at Cornell, MIT, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Originally trained as an architect at Cornell, he subsequently attended MIT, where he received a Master of Science and a PhD in Design and Computation. He also completed postdoctoral work at the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society. Website:  http://loukissas.lmc.gatech.edu/

Jim Budd brings 15 years of academic and research leadership in human-centered, interactive product design, as well as two decades of corporate design experience to the school. Most recently, he was associate professor of industrial and interaction design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where he headed the Wearables and Interactive Products Lab. Jim Budd is the past chair of Georgia Tech's School of Industrial Design. 

Rahul Saxena is the Interim Director for CREATE-X and the Associate Director for LAUNCH. Leading up to this role, Saxena had a career as a Venture Capitalist, startup CEO, entrepreneur, mechatronic design engineer, and published academic researcher. Saxena is a mechanical engineering Georgia Tech alumnus, earned his European Master’s degree in Fluid Mechanics from the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, and earned his MBA from Emory University. Saxena worked for Seraph Group, a venture capital firm, for 10 years evaluating and investing in companies while also holding the role of CEO in a company and serving on several boards of companies that went on to be acquired. 

Kait Morano is a Research Scientist II at the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). Her interests include urban planning, climate change, and spatial analysis, and her work focuses on designing innovative, equitable strategies to build community resilience. At IPaT, she serves as the Resilience Planning Director of the Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub.

Kait holds a bachelor’s in Geography from Virginia Tech and a master’s of City and Regional Planning from Georgia Tech, where she specialized in Geographic Information Systems. Prior to joining IPaT, Kait worked in local government on the Georgia coast, at the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization at Georgia Tech, and as an ORISE Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Judy Hoffman is an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, a member of the Machine Learning Center, and a Diversity and Inclusion Fellow. Her research lies at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning with specialization in domain adaptation, transfer learning, adversarial robustness, and algorithmic fairness. She has received numerous awards including the Samsung AI Researcher of the Year Award (2021), the NVIDIA female leader in computer vision award (2020), AIMiner top 100 most influential scholars in Machine Learning (2020), MIT EECS Rising Star in 2015, and is a recipient of the NSF Graduate Fellowship. In addition to her research, she co-founded and continues to advise for Women in Computer Vision, an organization which provides mentorship and travel support for early-career women in the computer vision community. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she was a research scientist at Facebook AI Research. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2016 after which she completed postdocs at Stanford University (2017) and UC Berkeley (2018).

Arriaga is a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher in the School of Interactive Computing. She uses psychological concepts, theories and methods to address fundamental topics of HCI and Social Computing. Her current research interests are in the area of chronic care management and mental health. She designs mHealth systems that address gaps in chronic care and mental health management. The computational systems she designs: foster engagement, facilitate continuity of care, promote patient self-advocacy, and mediate communication between patient and healthcare providers.

Duen Horng "Polo" Chau, Ph.D., is an Assistant 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.

I am currently Professor and KUKA Chair for Robotics in the School of Interactive Computing, and the Executive Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I am also Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Doug Blough, Ph.D., is a professor in the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering. After living in Japan for four years and graduating from the American School in Japan, Blough attended the Johns Hopkins University where he received the B.S.E.E. degree and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science in 1984, 1986, and 1988, respectively. From 1988 to 1999, he was first assistant and then associate professor at the University of California at Irvine, where he developed a research program focusing on the design of dependable computing systems at all levels from VLSI components to system architecture to software. In summer 1993, Blough worked on the design of a space-flight computer system under the auspices of a NASA/ASEE Faculty Fellowship and in spring 1996, he visited the Tokyo Institute of Technology on a fellowship from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science. In fall 1999, Blough joined Georgia Tech as a professor, where he continues research and education in computer systems design. He is the holder of 10 patents for wireless communications, bioinformatics and verifiable health records, identity management and other aspects of networking.