SPEAKERS

Emma Brunskill is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science and an affiliate professor in the Department of Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University. She is a Rhodes Scholar, a Microsoft Faculty Fellow, an NSF CAREER awardee and an ONR Young Investigator Program recipient. She focuses on interactive machine learning, and her work has been recognized with multiple best paper nominations.

 

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Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute
Carnegie Mellon University


Justine Cassell’s research interests originated in the study of human-human conversation and storytelling. Progressively she became interested in allowing computational systems to participate in these activities. This new technological focus led her to deconstruct the linguistic elements of conversation and storytelling in such a way as to embody machines with conversational, social and narrative intelligence so that they could interact with humans in human-like ways. Increasingly, however, her research has come to address the impact and benefits of technologies such as these on learning and communication. Cassell is the director emerita of the HCII. Currently, in addition to her role as a professor, Cassell is also associate dean of the School of Computer Science for technology strategy and impact at CMU, co-director of the university’s Simon Initiative, and co-director of the university’s Yahoo-InMind collaboration.


Limin Jia is an assistant research professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Jia received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University. She received her BE in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Science and Technology in China. Dr. Jia’s research interests are in formal aspects of software security, in particular, applying formal logic to constructing software systems with known security guarantees.

Annette Jacobson
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies

Bio:
Professor Annette Jacobson received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1979 and worked for PPG from then until 1985, attaining the rank of Senior Research Engineer. She returned to CMU and received her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Ethel Casassa. In 1988, she became the Director of the Colloids, Polymers and Surfaces Program, a joint program between the Mellon College of Science and the College of Engineering, Carnegie Institute of Technology. She is currently Teaching Professor of Chemical Engineering and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

Jelena Kovačević is the David Edward Schramm Professor and Head of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. She received the Dowd Fellowship at CMU, Belgrade October Prize, and the E.I. Jury Award at Columbia University. She is a coauthor on award-winning papers and of the textbooks Wavelets and Subband Coding and Foundations of Signal Processing. Dr. Kovacevic is the Fellow of the IEEE and was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. She was a keynote speaker at a number of meetings and has been involved in organizing numerous conferences. Her research interests include graph signal processing, multiresolution techniques, smart infrastructure and biomedical applications.

As Founding Executive Director of the Program for Research and Outreach on Gender Equity in Society at Carnegie Mellon University (PROGRESS), Ayana Ledford is a highly sought out national lecturer by nonprofit, corporate, government agencies, and academic institutions who seek to address the need for greater diversity. She is an expert on multiple factors influencing women’s long-term career success and utilizes negotiation as an essential leadership tool in her trainings.  PROGRESS’ mission is to improve society by empowering women and girls through the art of negotiation; Ms. Ledford’s fulfills this mission by providing negotiation training and self-sufficiency to women that are in all stages of their life. She has presented to over 500 for profit and nonprofit organizations. Her trainings and workshops have been presented to a variety of college campuses, businesses, nonprofit organizations, after school programs, private/public/independent schools, and community based programs. For example, groups such as the 2014 Women of Courage Awardees, Harvard University, Westminster College, Chatham University, PNC Bank, AmeriCorps, Dress for Success, Penn State University, University of Pittsburgh, BNY Mellon, National Association of Graduate Professionals, Pittsburgh Area Independent Teachers Association, Charles Schwab, American Association of University Women, and Emory College.   In addition, she developed innovative curriculum for next generation of women leaders. The path that led her toward her work was built on a foundation of advocacy,  with past work experience including time with the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation, the Bayer Center for Nonprofit Management at Robert Morris University and community organizing efforts made on behalf of low income Pittsburgh Public School students. She has also fought for low-income access to health care with the Consumer Health Coalition and while serving as a consultant in Central West Africa.  Some of her past and present commitments include serving on the board of the Kelly Strayhorn Theater, Sojourner House, Athena Awards host committee, Girls Coalition of Southwestern Pennsylvania, Terry McAdam Book Committee for Nonprofit Management, and founding member of the Sankofa Fund of Southwestern Pennsylvania. Ms. Ledford holds a bachelors from Dickinson College and Masters from the University of Pittsburgh.

Diana Marculescu is a professor and Associate Department Head for Academic Affairs in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon Universit. She received the Dipl.Ing. degree in computer science from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania, and the Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, in 1991 and 1998, respectively. She is currently a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Marculescu serves as Associate Department Head for Academic Affairs and is the Founding Director for the College of Engineering Center for Faculty Success at CMU. Her current research interests include energy- and reliability-aware computing, and more recently, CAD for non-silicon applications, including computational biology and sustainability.

José M. F. Moura is the Philip L. and Marsha Dowd University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, with the Electrical and Computer Engineering and, by courtesy, the BioMedical Engineering. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineers, a corresponding member of the Portugal Academy of Science, an IEEE Fellow, and a Fellow of the AAAS. He holds a D. Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, M.Sc., and EE degrees all from MIT and an EE degree from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST, Portugal). He was a visiting Professor at MIT (2006-2007, 1999-2000, and 1984-86), a visiting scholar at USC (Summers of 79-81), and was on the faculty of IST (Portugal).  Prof. Moura’s research interests are in statistical signal and image processing. He is working in the new area of Big Data and network science, with particular emphasis on distributed decision and inference in networked systems and graph based data.

 

Priya Narasimhan is a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research interests lie in the fields of dependable distributed systems, fault-tolerance, embedded systems, mobile systems and sports technology. She serves as the academic lead of the Intel Science and Technology Center in Embedded Computing (ISTC-EC) that comprises Carnegie Mellon, Penn State, UIUC, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, UC Berkeley and Georgia Tech. Priya Narasimhan is the CEO and Founder of YinzCam, Inc., a Carnegie Mellon spin-off company focused on mobile live streaming and scalable video technologies to provide the ultimate mobile fan experience to 40+ professional sports teams/venues. Her spare time is devoted to watching professional (American) football and ice-hockey games.

 

Assistant Professor of Databaseology
Computer Science Department
Carnegie Mellon University

Bio:
Andy Pavlo is an Assistant Professor of Databaseology in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interest is in database management systems, specifically main memory systems, non-relational systems (NoSQL), transaction processing systems (NewSQL), and large-scale data analytics. At CMU, he is a  member of the Database Group and the Parallel Data Laboratory. His work is also in collaboration with the Intel Science and Technology Center for Big Data.

Department Head and Professor, School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University


Frank Pfenning studied Mathematics and Computer Science at the Technical University Darmstadt and then left for Carnegie Mellon University on a Fulbright scholarship where he obtained his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1987 under the supervision of Professor Peter Andrews. He subsequently joined the Department of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University as research faculty where he became Professor in 2002 and served as Director of Graduate Programs from 2004 to 2008 and Associate Dean for Graduate Education from 2009 to 2010. He was appointed Head of the Computer Science Department in January 2013 and the Joseph F. Traub Professor of Computer Science in October 2015. He has spent time as visiting scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken, as Alexander-von-Humboldt fellow at the Technical University Darmstadt, and as visiting professor at École Polytechnique and INRIA-Futurs. He has advised 24 completed Ph.D. theses and won the Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence in the School of Computer Science in 2002.

 

Tanoto Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University

Larry Pileggi is the Tanoto Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. He previously held positions at Westinghouse Research and Development and the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989. His research interests include various aspects of digital and analog design and design methodologies. He has consulted for various semiconductor and EDA companies, and was a co-founder of Fabbrix (acquired by PDF Solutions in 2007) and Extreme DA (acquired by Synopsys in 2011). He has received various awards, including Westinghouse corporation’s highest engineering achievement award, a Presidential Young Investigator award from the National Science Foundation, Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) Technical Excellence Awards in 1991 and 1999, the inaugural Richard A. Newton GSRC Industrial Impact Award, the SRC Aristotle award in 2008, the 2010 EEE Circuits and Systems Society Mac Van Vlakenburg Award, the ACM/IEEE A. Richard Newton Technical Impact Award in Electronic Design Automation in 2011, the Carnegie Institute of Technology B.R. Teare Teaching Award for 2013, and the 2015 Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) University Researcher Award. He is a co-author of “Electronic Circuit and System Simulation Methods,” McGraw-Hill, 1995 and “IC Interconnect Analysis,” Springer, 2002. He has published over 300 refeereed conference and journal papers and holds 38 U.S. patents. He is a fellow of IEEE.



Associate Professor
Electrical & Computer Engineering Department
Carnegie Mellon University

Bio:

Aswin Sankaranarayanan is an Assistant Professor in the ECE department at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests lie in the areas of computer vision, signal processing, and image and video acquisition. He received his B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2003 and MSc and PhD degrees from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2007 and 2009, respectively. He was awarded the Distinguished Dissertation Fellowship by the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland in 2009.


Associate Professor
Machine Learning Department
Carnegie Mellon University

Bio:

Aarti Singh received her B.E. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the University of Delhi in 2001, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2003 and 2008, respectively. She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University from 2008-2009 before joining Carnegie Mellon.

Manuela Veloso is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. She researches in artificial intelligence and robotics. She founded and directs the CORAL research laboratory for the study of autonomous agents that Collaborate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn. Professor Veloso is IEEE Fellow, AAAS Fellow, AAAI Fellow, and the past President of AAAI and RoboCup. Professor Veloso and her students have worked with a variety of autonomous robots, including mobile service robots and soccer robots.

Assistant Professor
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Bio:
Carlee Joe-Wong is an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University’s Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics in 2016, where she was named a Jacobus and Centennial Fellow. Her primary research interests are in mathematical and economic aspects of computer and information networks. Carlee received her A.B. in mathematics in 2011 and her M.A. in applied mathematics in 2013, both from Princeton University. In 2013–2014, she was the Director of Advanced Research at DataMi, a startup she co-founded from her data pricing research. Carlee received the INFORMS ISS Design Science Award in 2014 for her work on smart data pricing and the Best Paper Award at IEEE INFOCOM 2012 for her work on fair multi-resource allocation. She was a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow (NDSEG) from 2011 to 2013.