Gregory D. Abowd is Dean of the College of Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. Prior to joining Northeastern in March 2021, he was a Regents’ Professor and held the J.Z. Liang Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also served as Associate Dean of Research and Space for the College of Computing. Abowd is an internationally renowned and highly cited scientist, well known for his contributions in the general area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and specifically for his groundbreaking research in ubiquitous computing.

In more than 26 years at Georgia Tech, Dr. Abowd initiated bold and innovative research efforts, such as Classroom 2000 and the Aware Home, as well as pioneering innovations in autism and technology, health systems, CampusLife, and a joint initiative with engineering in computational materials. He was on the founding editorial board of IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine, and was founding Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in HCI and The Proceedings of the ACM in Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies. He also founded the non-profit Atlanta Autism Consortium in 2008 to serve and unite the various stakeholder communities in Atlanta connected to autism research and services.

Dean Abowd’s contributions to the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing have been recognized through numerous awards. In 2008, he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. That same year, he was inducted into the ACM CHI Academy, the most prestigious honor for researchers in HCI. In 2009, he received the ACM Eugene Lawler Humanitarian Award for his work in autism and technology. As of 2020, he graduated 30 Ph.D. students, 20 of whom have gone on to successful careers at top universities around the world.

Dr. Abowd received the degree of B.S. in Honors Mathematics in 1986 from the University of Notre Dame. He then attended the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom on a Rhodes Scholarship, earning the degrees of M.Sc. (1987) and D.Phil. (1991) in Computation from the Programming Research Group in the Computing Laboratory. From 1989-1992 he was a Research Associate/Postdoc with the Human-Computer Interaction Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York in England. From 1992-1994, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Software Engineering Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

Ronald C. Arkin received the B.S. Degree from the University of Michigan, the M.S. Degree from Stevens Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987. He then assumed the position of Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he now holds the rank of Regents' Professor and is the Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory. He also serves as the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech since October 2008. During 1997-98, Professor Arkin served as STINT visiting Professor at the Centre for Autonomous Systems at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. From June-September 2005, Prof. Arkin held a Sabbatical Chair at the Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan and then served as a member of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Group at LAAS/CNRS in Toulouse, France from October 2005-August 2006.

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 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.

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