Prof. Srijan Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. His research develops data science solutions to address the high-stakes challenges on the web and in the society. He has pioneered the development of user models and network science tools to enhance the well-being and safety of people. Applications of his research widely span e-commerce, social media, finance, health, web, and cybersecurity. His methods to predict malicious users and false information have been widely adopted in practice (being used in production at Flipkart and Wikipedia) and taught at graduate level courses worldwide. He has received several awards including the ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award runner-up 2018, Larry S. Davis Doctoral Dissertation Award 2018, and best paper awards from WWW and ICDM. His research has been the subject of a documentary and covered in popular press, including CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, and New York Magazine. He completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University, received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park, and B.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.

Ling Liu is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Institute of Technology. She directs the research programs in Distributed Data Intensive Systems Lab (DiSL), examining various aspects of large scale big data systems and analytics, including performance, availability, security, privacy and trust. Prof. Liu is an elected IEEE Fellow and a recipient of IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award (2012). She has published over 300 international journal and conference articles and is a recipient of the best paper award from numerous top venues, including ICDCS, WWW, IEEE Cloud, IEEE ICWS, ACM/IEEE CCGrid. In addition to serve as general chair and PC chairs of numerous IEEE and ACM conferences in big data, distributed computing, cloud computing, data engineering, very large databases fields, Prof. Liu served as the editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Service Computing (2013-2016), on editorial board of over a dozen international journals. Ling’s current research is sponsored primarily by NSF and IBM.

Dr. Justin Romberg is the Schlumberger Professor and the Associate Chair for Research in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Associate Director for the Center for Machine Learning at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Romberg received the B.S.E.E. (1997), M.S. (1999) and Ph.D. (2004) degrees from Rice University in Houston, Texas. From Fall 2003 until Fall 2006, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in Applied and Computational Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. He spent the Summer of 2000 as a researcher at Xerox PARC, the Fall of 2003 as a visitor at the Laboratoire Jacques-Louis Lions in Paris, and the Fall of 2004 as a Fellow at UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. In the Fall of 2006, he joined the Georgia Tech ECE faculty. In 2008 he received an ONR Young Investigator Award, in 2009 he received a PECASE award and a Packard Fellowship, and in 2010 he was named a Rice University Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus. He is currently on the editorial board for the SIAM Journal on the Mathematics of Data Science, and is a Fellow of the IEEE.

His research interests lie on the intersection of signal processing, machine learning, optimization, and applied probability.

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.

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.

Thomas Ploetz is a computer scientist with expertise and almost 15 years of experience in Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning research (Ph.D. from Bielefeld University, Germany). His research agenda focuses on applied machine learning that is developing systems and innovative sensor data analysis methods for real world applications. Primary application domain for his work is computational behavior analysis, in which he develops methods for automated and objective behavior assessments in naturalistic environments. Main driving functions for his work are "in the wild" deployments and the development of systems and methods that have a real impact on people’s lives.

In 2017, Dr. Ploetz joined the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he works as an associate professor. Prior to this, he was an academic at the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University in Newcastle in Tyne, U.K., where he was a reader (associate professor) for Computational Behavior Analysis affiliated with Open Lab, Newcastle's interdisciplinary center for research in digital technologies.

Visit the Computational Behavior Analysis Lab: cba.gatech.edu.