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.

Carl DiSalvo is an Associate 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

Jeff Evans is a researcher with the Information Communication Laboratory (ICL) at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), where researchers work to solve complex problems in computer science, information technology, communications, networking and sociotechnical systems. Customers have included those in the Department of Defense (DoD), emergency response and health care systems spaces. Evans’ research has focused primarily on modes of communications in emerging technologies, particularly wireless systems, and he is involved as a project director for several advanced network and multimedia communications programs. One of his main research foci involves ensuring applications’ performance as they migrate across different networks for legacy systems and emerging, high-bandwidth access technologies. His early work developed into the Network Applications Integration Lab (NAIL) research testbed, which led to his working with campus and other labs across GTRI. After running some of ICL’s research programs in both the DoD and commercial spaces, he was asked to help launch up the first multi-disciplinary unit, the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) at Georgia Tech in order to integrate theoretical research, basic research and to conduct applied science about the emerging technologies that directly impact people: health care, education, humanitarian systems and media. He has helped build numerous international and industry partnerships, as well as multidisciplinary “living lab” test beds. Evans helped co-found GTRI’s Foundations for the Future (F3) program, which helps to bring Georgia Tech’s expertise into the state’s K-12 classrooms. ICL also has nationally recognized initiatives that includes the FalconView™ Program, the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) information exchange standards; communications research and antenna networks, both for troops and for evaluating IED countermeasures; emergency management technologies; and are developing a comprehensive approach to the Internet of Things.

Nicoleta Serban is the Peterson Professor of Pediatric Research in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Dr. Serban's most recent research focuses on model-based data mining for functional data, spatio-temporal data with applications to industrial economics with a focus on service distribution and nonparametric statistical methods motivated by recent applications from proteomics and genomics. 

She received her B.S. in Mathematics and an M.S. in Theoretical Statistics and Stochastic Processes from the University of Bucharest. She went on to earn her Ph.D. in Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Serban's research interests on Health Analytics span various dimensions including large-scale data representation with a focus on processing patient-level health information into data features dictated by various considerations, such as data-generation process and data sparsity; machine learning and statistical modeling to acquire knowledge from a compilation of health-related datasets with a focus on geographic and temporal variations; and integration of statistical estIMaTes into informed decision making in healthcare delivery and into managing the complexity of the healthcare system.

Alain Louchez is the Managing Director of the Center for the Development and Application of Internet of Things Technologies (CDAIT pronounced sedate) in charge of directing the Internet of Things (IoT)-related development efforts across the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech).  He is a member of the Advisory Council of the Georgia Tech Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) and the Georgia Tech Lorraine (European campus) Advisory Board.

Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he held various executive positions including Vice President for BellSouth (now AT&T) Europe; Executive Director of BellSouth France, and General Manager of GTE/Verizon Media Ventures’ wireless video operations in Hawaii. Most recently, he was Vice President of Strategic Management at Numerex, a company focused on machine-to-machine communications (M2M). He was instrumental in the development of the M2M Standardization Task Force at the Global Standards Collaboration.

Alain served on the board of directors of France Telecom Mobiles Data (France Telecom’s wireless data subsidiary); Cofira (Videndi’s founding parent of SFR, France’s second largest telecommunications operator); Com-Dev (a subsidiary of the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations group in charge of cable TV), SINEDI/Com-Dev Images (a holding company dedicated to investments in some French thematic TV channels such as Canal J, Planète, CinéCinéma, etc.) and Datech (BellSouth’s French direct marketing subsidiary).

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.