Tom M. Mitchell, PhD

Tom M. Mitchell is the Founders University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, where he founded the world’s first Machine Learning Department, and authored the widely used textbook “Machine Learning.” Mitchell’s research over the years has focused on machine learning, artificial intelligence, cognitive neuroscience, and the impact of AI on society.
Mitchell currently co-directs the CMU–Squirrel AI Lab on Personalized Education at Scale, which is pursuing the use of artificial intelligence to transform personalized education over the coming years.
A former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Mitchell is a fellow of both the AAAI and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and winner of the 2007 AAAI Distinguished Service Award. He was elected in 2010 to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, and in 2016 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His AI research has been featured in media ranging from the New York Times, to CBS’s 60 Minutes, to PBS’s “NOVA Science NOW,” to Chinese national television.

Suchi Saria, PhD

An AI expert and health AI pioneer, Suchi Saria’s research has led to myriad new inventions to improve patient care. Her work first demonstrated the use of machine learning to make early detection possible in sepsis, a life-threatening condition (Science Trans. Med. 2015). In Parkinson’s, her work showed a first demonstration of using readily-available sensors to easily track and measure symptom severity at home, to optimize treatment management (JAMA Neurology 2018). On the technical front, her work at the intersection of machine learning and causal inference has led to new ideas for building and evaluating reliable ML (ACM FAT 2019). Suchi currently holds a John C. Malone endowed chair at Johns Hopkins University, with appointments across engineering, public health, and medicine. She is also the Founder of Bayesian Health, aiming to revolutionize the delivery of healthcare by empowering providers and health systems with real-time access to essential clinical inferences. She is the recipient of numerous prizes and honors, including being named a Sloan Research Fellow, a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine, MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35, and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader.

Gill Bejerano, PhD

Gill Bejerano is an Associate Professor of Developmental Biology and Computer Science at Stanford University, and a member of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory and Bio-X program. Mr. Bejerano is a pioneer of Human Genome research. He is the discoverer of “Ultraconserved Elements”, human genomic regions that defy understanding of molecular evolution. He has also done influential work in applying Markovian models to biosequence analysis, and in showing that co-option of junk DNA into functional roles is an under-appreciated force shaping the evolution of the Human Genome. He serves Member of the Technical Advisory Board of Numenta, Inc. He holds a triple BSc in Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science (summa cum laude) and a PhD in Computer Science (Machine Learning applications in Bioinformatics) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Jeannette M. Wing, PhD

Jeannette M. Wing is Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. From 2013 to 2017, she was a Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research. She is Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon where she twice served as the Head of the Computer Science Department and had been on the faculty since 1985. From 2007-2010 she was the Assistant Director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. She received her S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor Wing’s general research interests are in the areas of trustworthy computing, specification and verification, concurrent and distributed systems, programming languages, and software engineering. Her current interests are in the foundations of security and privacy, with a new focus on trustworthy AI. She was or is on the editorial board of twelve journals, including the Journal of the ACM and Communications of the ACM. Professor Wing is known for her work on linearizability, behavioral subtyping, attack graphs, and privacy-compliance checkers. Her 2006 seminal essay, titled “Computational Thinking,” is credited with helping to establish the centrality of computer science to problem-solving in fields where previously it had not been embraced. She is currently a member of: the National Library of Medicine Blue Ribbon Panel; the Science, Engineering, and Technology Advisory Committee for the American Academy for Arts and Sciences; the Board of Trustees for the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics; the Advisory Board for the Association for Women in Mathematics; and the Alibaba DAMO Technical Advisory Board.

She has been chair and/or a member of many other academic, government, and industry advisory boards. She received the CRA Distinguished Service Award in 2011 and the ACM Distinguished Service Award in 2014. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE).

Eric Xing, PhD

Eric P. Xing is a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and the Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientist of Petuum Inc., a 2018 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer company that builds standardized artificial intelligence development platform and operating system for broad and general industrial AI applications. He completed his undergraduate study at Tsinghua University, and holds a PhD in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from the State University of New Jersey, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. His main research interests are the development of machine learning and statistical methodology, and large-scale computational system and architectures, for solving problems involving automated learning, reasoning, and decision-making in high-dimensional, multimodal, and dynamic possible worlds in artificial, biological, and social systems. Prof. Xing currently serves or has served the following roles: associate editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), Annals of Applied Statistics (AOAS), IEEE Journal of Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) and the PLoS Journal of Computational Biology; action editor of the Machine Learning Journal (MLJ) and Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR); member of the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Information Science and Technology (ISAT) advisory group. He is a recipient of the Carnegie Science Award, National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in Computer Science, the United States Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award, the IBM Open Collaborative Research Faculty Award, as well as several best paper awards. Prof Xing is a board member of the International Machine Learning Society; he has served as the Program Chair (2014) and General Chair (2019) of the International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML); he is also the Associate Department Head of the Machine Learning Department, founding director of the Center for Machine Learning and Health at Carnegie Mellon University; and he is a Fellow of the Association of Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and an IEEE Fellow.

Lisa Amini, PhD

Dr. Lisa Amini is the Director of IBM Research Cambridge, which is also home to the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and of IBM’s AI Horizons Network. Lisa was previously Director of Knowledge & Reasoning Research in the Cognitive Computing group at IBM’s TJ Watson Research Center in New York, and she is also an IBM Distinguished Engineer. Lisa was the founding Director of IBM Research Ireland, and the first woman Lab Director for an IBM Research Global (i.e., non-US) Lab (2010-2013). In this role she developed the strategy and led researchers in advancing science and technology for intelligent urban and environmental systems (Smarter Cities), with a focus on creating analytics, optimizations, and systems for sustainable energy, constrained resources (e.g., urban water management), transportation, and the linked open data systems that assimilate and share data and models for these domains. She earned her PhD degree in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Yashesh A. Shroff, PhD

Yashesh Shroff is a Lead Strategy Planner at Intel where he focuses on enabling the AI ecosystem on heterogenous compute. Recently, as product manager, he was responsible for the AI and media/game graphics software ecosystem showcasing Intel’s latest gen graphics architecture (10nm). He has over 15 years of technical and enabling experience, spanning optical modeling, statistical analysis, and capital equipment supply chain at Intel. He has over 20 published papers and 4 patents. He has a Ph.D. in EECS from UC Berkeley and a joint MBA from UC Berkeley Haas & Columbia Graduate School of Business.

Sriram Sankararaman, PhD

Sriram Sankararaman is an assistant professor in the Departments of Computer Science, Human Genetics, and Computational Medicine at UCLA where he leads the machine learning and genomic lab. His research interests lie at the interface of computer science, statistics and biology and is interested in developing statistical machine learning algorithms to make sense of large-scale biomedical data and in using these tools to understand the interplay between evolution, our genomes and traits. He received a B.Tech. in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and was a post-doctoral fellow in Harvard Medical School before joining UCLA. He is a recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship (2017), Okawa Foundation grant (2017), the UCLA Hellman fellowship (2017), the NIH Pathway to Independence Award (2014), a Simons Research fellowship (2014), and a Harvard Science of the Human Past fellowship (2012) as well as the Northrop-Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award at UCLA (2019).

Tian Zheng, PhD

Tian Zheng is Professor and Department Chair of Statistics at Columbia University. She develops novel methods for exploring and understanding patterns in complex data from different application domains. Her current projects are in the fields of statistical machine learning, spatiotemporal modeling and social network analysis. Professor Zheng’s research has been recognized by the 2008 Outstanding Statistical Application Award from the American Statistical Association (ASA), the Mitchell Prize from ISBA and a Google research award. She became a Fellow of American Statistical Association in 2014. Professor Zheng is the recipient of the 2017 Columbia’s Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. From 2018-2020, she has been the chair-elect, chair and past-chair for ASA’s section on Statistical Learning and Data Science.

Tina Eliassi-Rad, PhD

Tina Eliassi-Rad is a Professor of Computer Science at Northeastern University. She is also a core faculty member at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute. Prior to joining Northeastern, Tina was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University; and before that she was a Member of Technical Staff and Principal Investigator at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Tina earned her Ph.D. in Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research is rooted in data mining and machine learning; and spans theory, algorithms, and applications of big data from networked representations of physical and social phenomena. She has over 100 peer-reviewed publications (including a few best paper and best paper runner-up awardees). Tina’s work has been applied to personalized search on the World-Wide Web, statistical indices of large-scale scientific simulation data, fraud detection, mobile ad targeting, cyber situational awareness, and ethics in machine learning. Her algorithms have been incorporated into systems used by the government and industry (e.g., IBM System G Graph Analytics) as well as open-source software (e.g., Stanford Network Analysis Project). In 2017, Tina served as the program co-chair for the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining  and as the program co-chair for the International Conference on Network Science . In 2020, she is serving as the program co-chair for the International Conference on Computational Social Science. Tina received an Outstanding Mentor Award from the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy in 2010; and became a Fellow of the ISI Foundation in Turin Italy in 2019. 

Shanghang Zhang, PhD

Dr. Shanghang Zhang is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley, USA. She received her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2018. Her research interests cover deep learning, computer vision, and reinforcement learning, as reflected in her numerous publications in top-tier journals and conference proceedings, including NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, and AAAI. Her research mainly focuses on machine learning with limited training data, including low-shot learning, domain adaptation, and meta-learning, which enables the learning system to automatically adapt to real-world variations and new environments. She was one of the “2018 Rising Stars in EECS” (a highly selective program launched at MIT in 2012, which has since been hosted at UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford annually). She has also been selected for the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QInF) Finalist Award and Chiang Chen Overseas Graduate Fellowship.

Reza Shiftehfar, PhD

Reza Shiftehfar currently leads Uber’s Hadoop Platform teams. His teams help build and grow Uber’s reliable and scalable Big Data platform that serves petabytes of data utilizing technologies such as Apache Hadoop, Apache Hive, Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, and Presto. Reza is one of the founding engineers of Uber’s Data team and helped scale Uber’s data platform from a few terabytes to over 100 petabytes while reducing big data latency from 24+ hours to minutes. Reza holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.