Josiah Hester works broadly in computer engineering, with a special focus on wearable devices, edge computing, and cyber-physical systems. His Ph.D. work focused on energy harvesting and battery-free devices that failed intermittentently. He now focuses on sustainable approaches to computing, via designing health wearables, interactive devices, and large-scale sensing for conservation. 
   
His work in health is focused on increasing accessibility and lowering the burden of getting preventive and acute healthcare. In both situations, he designs low-burden, high-fidelity wearable devices that monitor aspects of physiology and behavior, and use machine learning techniques to suggest or deliver adaptive and in-situ interventions ranging from pharmacological to behavioral. 
   
His work is supported by multiple grants from the NSF, NIH, and DARPA. He was named a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and won his NSF CAREER in 2022. He was named one of Popular Science's Brilliant Ten, won the American Indian Science and Engineering Society Most Promising Scientist/Engineer Award, and the 3M Non-tenured Faculty Award in 2021. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, BBC, Popular Science, Communications of the ACM, and the Guinness Book of World Records, among many others.

Ashok Goel is a Professor of Computer Science in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA. He obtained his Ph.D. from The Ohio State University. At Georgia Tech, he is also the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Human-Centered Computing, a Co-Director of the Center for Biologically Inspired Design, and a Fellow of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. For more than thirty years, Ashok has conducted research into artificial intelligence, cognitive science and human-centered computing, with a focus on computational design, modeling and creativity. His recent work has explored design thinking, analogical thinking and systems thinking in biological inspired design (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiRDQ4hr9i8), and his research is now developing virtual research assistants for modeling biological systems. Ashok teaches a popular course on knowledge-based AI as part of Georgia Tech's program on Online Masters of Science in Computer Science. He has pioneered the development of virtual teaching assistants, such as Jill Watson, for answering questions in online discussion forums (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbCguICyfTA). Chronicle of Higher Education recently called virtual assistants exemplified by Jill Watson as one of the most transformative educational technologies in the digital era. Ashok is the Editor-in-Chief of AAAI's AI Magazine.

Andrea Grimes Parker is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and at Morehouse School of Medicine. Dr. Parker holds a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech and a B.S. in Computer Science from Northeastern University. She is the founder and director of the Wellness Technology Lab at Georgia Tech. Her interdisciplinary research spans the domains of human-computer interaction and public health, as she examines how social and interactive computing systems can be designed to address health inequities. Dr. Parker has published widely in the space of digital health equity and received several best paper honorable mention awards for her research. Her research has been funded through awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Aetna Foundation, Google, and Johnson & Johnson. 

Jennifer Gahee Kim is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Kim’s research interests lie in human-computer interaction and digital health, where she investigates how social and health information systems can be designed to promote diversity, advocacy, and empathy. With her research, she is especially passionate about impacting the lives of neurodiverse people and the communities around them.

Research Areas:
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI); Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW); Digital Health; Neurodiversity

Athanassios (Thanos) Economou is Professor at the School of Architecture in the College of Design, and Adjunct Professor at the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Economou’s teaching and research are in the areas of shape grammars, computational design, computer-aided design and design theory, with over sixty published papers in these areas. He is the Director of the Shape Computation Lab, a research group that explores how the visual nature of shape can be formally implemented with new technologies to enable new paradigms in visual computation, design automation, creative design and digital heritage. Recent projects include the Shape Machine, a new computational technology that allows shape matching in CAD systems, and Courtsweb, the most significant visual database on Federal Courthouses, sponsored by GSA and US.Courts. Design projects from his studios at Georgia Tech have received prestigious awards in international and national architectural competitions. He has been invited to give talks, seminars, and workshops at several universities including MIT, Harvard, TU Vienna, U. Michigan, KAIST, Chiao Tung U Taiwan, Emory, Seoul National U, Cambridge U, Tsinghua U, UCLA, NTUA, U.Thessaly, U.Aegean, among others. Dr. Economou holds a Diploma in Architecture from NTUA, Athens, Greece, an M.Arch from USC, and a PhD in Architecture from UCLA.

Shaowen Bardzell is Chair and Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Interactive Computing.

Bardzell holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Indiana University and pursues a humanistic research agenda within the research and practice of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). A common thread throughout her work is the exploration of the contributions of feminism, design, and social science to support technology’s role in social change. Recent research topics include care ethics and feminist utopian perspectives on IT, research through design, women’s health, posthumanist approaches to sustainable design, computational agriculture and food justice, and cultural and creative industries in Asia. Her work is supported by the National Science Foundation, Intel Corporation, and the Mellon Foundation, among others.

She is the co-editor of Critical Theory and Interaction Design (MIT Press, 2018) and co-author of Humanistic HCI (Morgan & Claypool, 2015). 

Christopher J. MacLellan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he leads the Teachable AI Lab (TAIL; https://tail.cc.gatech.edu). His work on cognitive systems aims to advance our understanding of how people teach and learn and to build AI systems that can teach and learn like people do and in ways that are compatible with people. He explores the development of computational models of learning and how these models can support the development of AI technologies, such as intelligent tutoring systems and medical decision support systems, at scale.

He also investigates how data collected about how people learn and make decisions can be leveraged to drive the development of better cognitive models and computational learning systems. Chris has been a principal investigator on multiple sponsored project awards with DARPA, the U.S. Army, ONR, and NSF. He has also received external recognition for his work, such as the 2022 EAAI Now and Future AI Educator award as well as being named on the 2021 Technical.ly RealLIST of technologists building Philadelphia’s future.  

Prior to his position at Georgia Tech, Chris was an Assistant Professor of Information Science and Computer Science (by co-appointment) at Drexel University. Before that, he completed his PhD in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computing, where he was a fellow in the Program for Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER).

The products of his work have immediate implications for AI-powered technology development. For example, through his work with the NSF-funded AI ALOE Institute, Chris is developing tools that let teachers build AI-powered tutors by naturally teaching an AI agent rather than programming. His work also has many broader implications, such as enabling doctors to support the development of AI-powered diagnoses tools where few training examples are available (DARPA-funded POCUS project) and for creating personal assistant agents that can engage in collaborative learning to support more effective human-machine teaming (ARL-funded STRONG project).

Research Areas: 

Artificial Intelligence; Cognitive Systems; Cognitive and Learning Sciences; Human-Computer Interaction; Learning Technology.

Clio Andris is an assistant professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her research is on mathematical models of social networks, social flows, and interpersonal relationships in geographic space, applied to issues of urban planning, visualization, transportation and geography. She teaches GIScience classes at multiple levels including Environmental GIS and Spatial Network Analysis, as well as classes on Information Visualization. She is a member of the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization (CSPAV) and an affiliate of the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development (CQGRD). She is also a member of the School of Interactive Computing's Information Visualization research group. She received her PhD from MIT in 2011 in Urban Information Systems where she was an NDSEG fellow and member of the Senseable City Lab. She held postdoctoral positions at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) at the Santa Fe Institute.

Academic Specialty: 
Geographic Information Science and Technology

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.