Faculty Summit 2017: The Edge of AI

Sean Andrist is a researcher at Microsoft Research in the adaptive systems and Interaction group. His research focuses on “situated embodied interaction,” particularly human-robot interaction in open world settings. He is investigating how a heterogeneous set of multimodal sensors can be leveraged to improve a robot’s awareness of the social context around it, and how that enhanced representation can be coupled with actions and behaviors that improve the robot’s task and social capabilities, as well as increasing user acceptance and rapport. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016, where he researched social gaze mechanisms for human-robot and human-agent interaction.

Isabelle Augenstein is a postdoctoral research associate in the department of computer science at University College London (UCL). Her main research interests are statistical natural language processing and weakly supervised learning, with applications including automated fact checking and machine reading of scientific publications. Prior to joining UCL, she was a research associate and PhD student at the University of Sheffield, a research assistant at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and a computational linguistics student at Heidelberg University. She is currently organizing a shared task on information extraction from scientific publications at SemEval 2017, the first WiNLP workshop at ACL 2017, and a workshop on deep structured prediction at ICML.

Kalika Bali is a researcher at Microsoft Research India working in the areas of machine learning, natural language systems and applications, as well as technology for emerging markets. Her research interests lie broadly in the area of speech and language technology especially in the use of linguistic models for building technology that offers natural human-computer interactions.

She is currently working on Project Mélange, which tries to understand, process and generate code-mixed language (more than one language in a single conversation) data for both text and speech. Recently, Bali has become interested in how social and pragmatic functions affect language use, and how to build effective computational models of sociolinguistics and pragmatics that can lead to more aware AI. Bali is also interested in natural language processing and speech technology for Indian languages, serving on several committees that work on Indian language technologies.

Solon Barocas is an assistant professor in the department of information science at Cornell University. His research explores ethical and policy issues in AI, particularly fairness in machine learning, methods for bringing accountability to automated decision-making, and the privacy implications of inference. In 2014, Barocas co-founded Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning (FAT/ML), an annual event that brings together an emerging community of researchers working on these issues. He was previously a postdoctoral researcher in the New York City lab of Microsoft Research, where he was a member of the fairness, accountability, transparency, and ethics in AI group, as well as a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He completed his doctorate in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where he remains an affiliate of the Information Law Institute.

Chris Basoglu, PhD is a partner engineering manager in Speech Recognition Services team at Microsoft. He is responsible for the Microsoft speech recognition runtime software as well as Microsoft-wide speech service infrastructure.

Tanya Berger-Wolf is a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she heads the Computational Population Biology Lab. As a computational ecologist, her research is at the unique intersection of computer science, wildlife biology, and social sciences. She creates computational solutions to address questions such as how environmental factors affect the behaviors of social animals (humans included). Berger-Wolf is also a cofounder of the conservation software nonprofit Wildbook, which recently enabled the first-of-its-kind complete species census of the endangered Grevy’s zebra, using photographs taken by ordinary citizens in Kenya.

Berger-Wolf holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has received numerous awards for her research and mentoring, including the US National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Association for Women in Science Chicago Innovator Award, and the UIC Mentor of the Year Award.

Jeffrey P. Bigham is an associate professor in the Human-Computer Interaction and Language Technologies Institutes in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He uses clever combinations of crowds and computation to build truly intelligent systems that automate themselves over time. Bigham received his BSE degree in computer science from Princeton University in 2003, and received his PhD in computer science and engineering from the University of Washington in 2009. He has been a visiting researcher at MIT CSAIL, Microsoft Research, and Google X. He has received a number of awards for his work, including the MIT Technology Review Top 35 Innovators Under 35 Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is a member of the inaugural class of the ACM Future of Computing Academy.

Christopher Bishop is a Microsoft technical fellow and the laboratory director at Microsoft Research Cambridge. He is also professor of computer science at the University of Edinburgh, and a fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. He has been elected fellow of both the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Bishop obtained a BA in physics from Oxford, and a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on quantum field theory. He worked at Culham Laboratory on the theory of magnetically confined plasmas, and was head of the Applied Neurocomputing Centre at AEA Technology.

He was also a chair in the department of computer science and applied mathematics at Aston University, where he led the neural computing research group. After running the international research program on neural networks and machine learning at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, he joined the Microsoft Research Laboratory in Cambridge.

Olaf Blanke is founding director of the Center for Neuroprosthetics and holds the Bertarelli Foundation Chair in Cognitive Neuroprosthetics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). He also directs the Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience at EPFL and is professor of neurology at the University Hospital of Geneva. Blanke’s neuroscience research is dedicated to the study of consciousness and how bodily processing of the brain encodes the self, including such fascinating alterations of the self as out-of-body experiences and ghost sensations. He has authored over 200 scientific articles, including those published in Nature, Science, Lancet and Brain, and has delivered over 200 presentations. His work includes pioneering technology research in virtual reality, augmented virtuality, brain-machine interfaces, and robotics dedicated to the control and enabling of complex subjective mental states (i.e. experience engineering). Blanke is member of the board and chief scientific advisor at Mindmaze, a virtual reality and rehabilitation company. In his medical research in neurorehabilitation and neuroprosthetics, Blanke develops devices and procedures for diagnostics and therapeutics for several neurological conditions.

Sandy Blyth is managing director of MSR Outreach. He joined Microsoft Research in March of 2017 from the Microsoft finance team, where he ran the integration management practice of Microsoft’s Venture Integration (VI) group. His team most recently supported such acquisitions as Maluuba, Swiftkey, and LinkedIn.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Blyth was managing director of Parhelion Partners, LLC, a regional investment bank serving entrepreneurial growth companies. His technology experiences include work in hardware and software product development; management, consulting and services delivery; and sales, business development and partnerships at IBM, AT&T, Cambridge Technology Partners, Pivotal Software, and Kaivo.

Dan Bohus is a senior researcher in the adaptive systems and interaction group at Microsoft Research. Bohus’ research agenda centers on developing methods that enable interactive systems to reason more deeply about their physical surroundings and seamlessly participate in open-world, multiparty spoken dialog and collaboration with people. Before joining Microsoft Research, Dan received his PhD degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Rich Caruana is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research. His current research focus is on learning for medical decision making, transparent modeling, deep learning, and computational ecology. Before joining Microsoft, Caruana was on the faculty in the computer science department at Cornell University, at UCLA’s medical school, and at Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Learning and Discovery. Caruana holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. He has received an NSF CAREER Award, and three best paper awards. He co-chaired KDD in 2007 and serves as area chair for NIPS, ICML, and KDD.

Justine Cassell is associate dean of technology strategy and impact and professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Director Emerita of the Human Computer Interaction Institute. She codirects the Yahoo-CMU InMind partnership on the future of personal assistants. Previously Cassell was faculty at Northwestern University where she founded the Technology and Social Behavior Center and doctoral program. Before that she was a tenured professor at the MIT Media Lab. Cassell received the MIT Edgerton Award and Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award, in 2011 was named to the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on AI and Robotics, in 2012 was named an AAAS Fellow, and in 2016 was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Scotland, and named an ACM Fellow. Cassell has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos for the past five years on topics concerning artificial intelligence and society.

Rama Chellappa is a distinguished university professor and a Minta Martin professor at the University of Maryland (UMD). Chellappa has worked on Markov random fields, 3D recovery from images, face recognition, tracking, action recognition, compressive sensing, dictionary learning, and domain adaptation. Chellappa is a recipient of an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award and four IBM Faculty Development Awards. Chellappa received the K.S. Fu Prize from the International Association of Pattern Recognition (IAPR). He is a recipient of the Society and Technical Achievement Awards from the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society. At UMD, he received college-level and university-level recognitions for research, teaching, innovation, and mentoring of undergraduate students. Chellappa served as the editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IAPR, OSA, AAAS, ACM, and AAAI and holds six patents.

Jung Hee Cheon is a professor in the department of mathematical sciences and the director of the Cryptographic Hard Problems Research Initiatives (CHRI) at Seoul National University (SNU).

He received his BS and PhD degrees in mathematics from KAIST in 1991 and 1997, respectively. Before joining SNU, he worked for Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Brown University, and International Christian University (ICU). He received the best paper award in Asiacrypt 2008 and Eurocrypt 2015. His research focuses on computational number theory and cryptology. He is an associate editor of Designs, Codes and Cryptography (DCC) and Journal of Communications and Networks (JCN), and served as program committee member for Crypto, Eurocrypt, and Asiacrypt. He was a cochair of ANTS-XI and Asiacrypt 2015/2016.

Jackie Chi Kit Cheung is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at McGill University, where he codirects the Reasoning and Learning Lab. He received his PhD at the University of Toronto, and was awarded a Facebook Fellowship for his doctoral research. He and his team conduct research on computational semantics and natural language generation, with the goal of developing systems that can perform complex reasoning in tasks such as event understanding and automatic summarization.

Mary Czerwinski is a research manager of the Visualization and Interaction (VIBE) Research Group. Czerwinski’s research focuses primarily on emotion tracking, information worker task management, and health and wellness for individuals and groups. Her background is in visual attention and multitasking. She holds a PhD in cognitive psychology from Indiana University in Bloomington. Czerwinski was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award, was inducted into the CHI Academy, and became an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2010. Czerwinski became a fellow of the ACM in 2016. She also received the Distinguished Alumni award from Indiana University’s brain and psychological sciences department in 2014.

Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil is an assistant professor in the information science department at Cornell University. His research aims at developing computational frameworks that can lead to a better understanding of human social behavior, specifically leveraging natural language datasets generated online. He is the recipient of several awards—including the WWW 2013 Best Paper Award, a CSCW 2017 Best Paper Award, and a Google Faculty Research Award—and his work has been featured in The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered and NBC’s The Today Show.

Susan Dumais is a distinguished scientist at Microsoft, assistant director of Microsoft Research AI, and an adjunct professor in the information school at the University of Washington. Prior to joining Microsoft, she was at Bell Labs, where she worked on latent semantic analysis, techniques for combining search and navigation, and organizational impacts of information systems. Her current research focuses on user modeling and personalization, context and search, and temporal dynamics of information. Dumais has published widely, and holds several patents on novel retrieval algorithms and interfaces. She is past-chair of ACM’s Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), and serves on several editorial boards, technical program committees, and government panels. She was elected to the CHI Academy in 2005, an ACM Fellow in 2006, received the SIGIR Gerard Salton Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2009, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2011, received the ACM Athena Lecturer and Tony Kent Strix Awards in 2014, was elected to AAAS in 2015, and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Indiana University department of psychological and brain science in 2016.

Michel Galley is a researcher at Microsoft Research. His research interests are in the areas of natural language processing and machine learning, with a particular focus on dialog, machine translation, and summarization. Galley obtained his MS and PhD from Columbia University and his BS from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), all in computer science. Before joining Microsoft Research, he was a research associate in the computer science department at Stanford University. He also spent summers visiting University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute and the Spoken Dialog Systems group at Bell Labs. Galley served twice as area chair at top natural language processing (NLP) conferences (ACL and NAACL), and was twice best paper finalist (NAACL 2010 and EMNLP 2013).

Jianfeng Gao is partner research manager at the Microsoft AI and Research Group, Redmond. He works on deep learning for text and image processing and leads the development of AI systems for machine reading comprehension, question answering, dialog, and business applications. He has also been principal researcher at the Natural Language Processing Group at Microsoft Research, where he worked on web search, query understanding and reformulation, ads prediction, and statistical machine translation, and was a research lead in the Natural Interactive Services Division at Microsoft, where he worked on Project X. Previously, he was research lead in the Natural Language Computing Group at Microsoft Research Asia, where he and his colleagues developed the first Chinese speech recognition system released with Microsoft Office, the Chinese/Japanese Input Method Editors, and the natural language platform for Microsoft Windows.

Ran Gilad-Bachrach, Phd, is a machine learning researcher in the cryptology group at Microsoft Research. His current projects focus on fusing privacy technologies with AI technologies with an emphasis on applications in health. Gilad-Bachrach has been conducting research in machine learning for the past 20 years. His studies span both theoretical aspects of this field, algorithms, and applications in diverse domains such as education, web-search, and computational psychology.

Carla Gomes is a professor of computer science and the director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University. Her research area is AI, with a focus on large-scale constraint reasoning, optimization, and machine learning. Recently, Gomes research has been in the new field of computational sustainability, which she helped create as a discipline. She is currently the lead PI of a Natural Science Foundation Expeditions-in-Computing that established CompSustNet, a large-scale national and international research network, to further expand the field of computational sustainability. Gomes is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Mar Gonzalez-Franco is a researcher at Microsoft Research. She studied computer science and completed her PhD in neuroscience and virtual reality in 2014 at University of Barcelona. In her research, she tries to achieve strong immersive experiences using different disciplines: virtual reality, computer graphics, computer vision, and haptics (computer touch), combined with human behavior, perception, and neuroscience. Before joining MSR she held several research positions, including at University College London, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University, and Airbus Group. Her work in virtual reality has been featured in The Verge, TechCrunch, GeekWire, Fortune, and the World Economic Forum.

Jonathan Gratch is director for virtual human research at the University of Southern California’s (USC) Institute for Creative Technologies, a research full professor of computer science and psychology at USC, and director of USC’s Computational Emotion Group. He completed his PhD in computer science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 1995. Gratch’s research focuses on computational models of human cognitive and social processes, especially emotion, and explores these models’ role in shaping human-computer interactions in virtual environments. He is the founding editor-in-chief of IEEE’s Transactions on Affective Computing, associate editor of Emotion Review and the Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, and former president of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing. He is an AAAI Fellow, a SIGART Autonomous Agent’s Award recipient, a senior member of IEEE, and member of the Academy of Management and the International Society for Research on Emotion. Gratch is the author of more than 300 technical articles.

Amy Greenwald, PhD, is associate professor of computer science at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She studies game-theoretic and economic interactions among computational agents, applied to areas such as autonomous bidding in wireless spectrum auctions and ad exchanges. She was named a Fulbright Scholar, awarded a Sloan Fellowship, nominated for the 2002 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and named one of the Computing Research Association’s Digital Government Fellows. Before joining the faculty at Brown, Greenwald was employed by IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center. Her paper entitled “Shopbots and Pricebots” (joint work with Jeff Kephart) was named Best Paper at IBM Research in 2000.

Barbara J. Grosz is Higgins Professor of Natural Sciences in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. She has made many contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) through her pioneering research in natural language processing and in theories of multiagent collaboration and their application to human-computer interaction. She was founding dean of science and then dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and she is known for her role in the establishment and leadership of interdisciplinary institutions and for her contributions to the advancement of women in science. She currently chairs the Standing Committee for Stanford’s One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence and serves on the boards of several scientific and scholarly institutes. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Philosophical Society, she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the Association for Computing Machinery, and a corresponding fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. She received the 2009 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award and the 2015 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence, AI’s highest honor.

Eric Horvitz (opens in new tab) is a technical fellow and director of Microsoft Research Labs. His contributions span theoretical and practical challenges with artificial intelligence. His efforts and collaborations include the fielding of learning and reasoning systems in transportation, healthcare, aerospace, ecommerce, online services, and operating systems. He has been elected fellow of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Feigenbaum Prize and the Allen Newell Award for research contributions in AI. He was inducted into the CHI Academy for advances in human-computer collaboration. He has served as president of AAAI, chair of the AAAS Section on Computing, and on advisory committees for the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB), DARPA, and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

He received PhD and MD degrees from Stanford University.

Gang Hua is a principal researcher/research manager at Microsoft Research. He was an associate professor of computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology between 2011 and 2015, while holding an academic advisor position at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. Before that, he was a research staff member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, a senior researcher at Nokia Research Center, and a scientist at Microsoft Live Labs Research. He received his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Northwestern University in 2006. He will serve as a program chair for CVPR 2019, the flagship computer vision conference. He is the recipient of the 2015 IAPR Young Biometrics Investigator Award. He is an IAPR Fellow, an ACM Distinguished Scientist, and a senior member of the IEEE. He holds 19 US patents and has 12 more patents pending.

Katsushi Ikeuchi is a principal researcher of Microsoft Research. He received his PhD in information engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1978. He worked at MIT-AI Lab as a postdoc fellow for three years, at Electrotechnical Laboratory (currently AIST) as a research member for five years, at CMU-Robotics Institute as a faculty member for 10 years, and at the University of Tokyo as a faculty member for 19 years, joining Microsoft Research in 2015. His research interests span computer vision, robotics, and computer graphics. He has received several awards, including IEEE-PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award, the Okawa Prize, and the Medal of Honor with purple ribbon from the Emperor of Japan. He is a fellow of IEEE, IEICE, IPSJ, and RSJ.

Kori Inkpen is a principal researcher and research manager at Microsoft Research, focusing on human-computer interaction and computer-supported collaboration. She explores collaboration across a variety of domains including home, work, education, healthcare and fun, with a current focus on video communication for telepresence. Inkpen manages the neXus (opens in new tab) group at Microsoft Research, which combines research in social computing, computer-supported collaborative work, and information visualization. She has also been a professor of computer science at Dalhousie University and Simon Fraser University. She received her PhD in computer science from the University of British Columbia.

Prateek Jain is a researcher at Microsoft Research India. He received his PhD in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin and his bachelor of technology degree in computer science from IIT Kanpur. He is interested in high-dimensional statistics/optimization, non-convex optimization, and numerical linear algebra. He has served on several senior program committees for top machine learning conferences and also won ICML-2007 and CVPR-2008 best student paper awards.

Ana Tajadura-Jiménez studied telecommunications engineering at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. She obtained an MSc in Digital Communications Systems and Technology and a PhD in applied acoustics at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. Tajadura-Jiménez was a post-doctoral researcher in the Lab of Action and Body at Royal Holloway, University of London, an ESRC Future Research Leader at University College London Interaction Centre (UCLIC), and principal investigator (PI) of the project The Hearing Body. Since 2016 Tajadura-Jiménez has been a Ramón y Cajal research fellow at Universidad Loyola Andalucía (ULA) and Honorary Research Associate at UCLIC. At ULA, she is part of the Human Neuroscience Laboratory and coordinates the research line called “Multisensory stimulation to alter the perception of body and space, emotion and motor behavior.” She is currently PI of the Project Magic Shoes. Tajadura-Jiménez’s research is empirical and multidisciplinary, combining perspectives of psychoacoustics, neuroscience, and human/computer interaction.

Lucas Joppa is the chief environmental scientist for Microsoft, identifying the role that Microsoft artificial intelligence technologies can play in assisting with global environmental solutions. Topics of interest include some of the hardest challenges in environmental sustainability, including mitigating and adapting to changing climates, ensuring robust food systems and resilient water supplies, and stemming the loss of biodiversity. Joppa also provides external leadership in the technology and science communities through boards, speaking, and publications. Previously, Joppa led science programs at Microsoft Research, focusing on the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and ubiquitous computing technologies for monitoring, modeling, and managing earth’s natural environments.

Sham Kakade is a Washington Research Foundation data science chair, with a joint appointment in both the computer science and engineering and statistics departments at the University of Washington. He completed his PhD at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience unit at University College London, and earned his BS in physics at Caltech. Before joining the University of Washington, Kakade was a principal research scientist at Microsoft Research, New England. Prior to this, he was an associate professor at the department of statistics, Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, and an assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. He works on both theoretical and applied questions in machine learning and artificial intelligence, focusing on designing both statistically and computationally efficient algorithms for machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence. He has chaired many conferences and received numerous awards.

Ece Kamar is a researcher at the adaptive systems and interaction group at Microsoft Research Redmond. Kamar earned her PhD in computer science from Harvard University. She has served as area chair and program committee member for various conferences on AI and was a member of the first AI 100 panel, studying how AI will affect the way we live. She works on several subfields of AI; including planning, machine learning, multi-agent systems and human-computer teamwork, with a focus on combining machine and human intelligence in real-world applications.

Subbarao Kambhampati (Rao) is a professor of computer science at Arizona State University, and is the current president of the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), and a trustee of the Partnership for AI. His research focuses on automated planning and decision making, especially in the context of human-aware AI systems. He is an award-winning teacher and spends significant time pondering the public perceptions and societal impacts of AI. He was a National Science Foundation young investigator, and is a fellow of AAAI. He has served the AI community in multiple roles, including as the program chair for IJCAI 2016 and program co-chair for AAAI 2005. Kambhampati received his bachelor’s degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and his PhD from University of Maryland, College Park.

Shaun Kane is an assistant professor in the department of computer science and the department of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is director of the CU Superhuman Computing Lab. His research explores accessible user interfaces, tangible interaction, and wearable computing. His research has been supported by a Google Lime Scholarship, an NSF CAREER Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. He received his PhD from The Information School at the University of Washington in 2011.

Ravi Kannan is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research India, where he leads the algorithms research group. He also holds an adjunct faculty position in the computer science and automation department of the Indian Institute of Science. Before joining Microsoft, Kannan was the William K. Lanman, Jr. professor of computer science and applied mathematics at Yale University. He has also taught at MIT and CMU. Kannan’s research interests include algorithms, theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics, as well as optimization. He was awarded the Knuth Prize for developing influential algorithmic techniques aimed at solving long-standing computational problems, the Fulkerson Prize for his work on estimating the volume of convex sets, and the Distinguished Alumnus award of the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.

Helmut Katzgraber is a professor in the physics and astronomy department at Texas A&M University. His main research fields in computational physics are the investigation of disordered and complex systems, as well as the study of problems related to quantum computing. He received his PhD in physics in 2001 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for numerical studies of spin-glass systems, and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Davis, and the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich. In 2007 he was awarded a Swiss National Science Foundation professorship and in 2009 he joined Texas A&M University. In 2011 he received an NSF CAREER award. He is also external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and consults for 1QB Information Technologies and Microsoft Research.

Taesoo Kim is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He also serves as the director of the Georgia Tech Systems Software and Security Center (GTS3). His research focus area is system security, particularly their design, implementation, and clear separation of trusted components. His thesis work focused on detecting and recovering from attacks on computer systems. He holds a BS from KAIST, and an SM and PhD from MIT in computer science.

Ian Lane, PhD, is an associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University, working in the areas of speech recognition, natural language understanding, and situated interaction. Lane leads a research group of 10 PhD students in Silicon Valley focused on these research areas. Lane’s group has done novel research in the areas of GPU-accelerated speech recognition, context-aware spoken language understanding, and more recently his group has demonstrated the effectiveness of end-to-end trainable models for speech recognition and dialog. He has more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and has obtained numerous patents and awards for his work.

Walter S. Lasecki is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he directs the Crowds+Machines (CROMA) Lab. He and his students create interactive intelligent systems that are robust enough to be used in real-world settings by combining both human and machine intelligence to exceed the capabilities of either. These systems let people be more productive, and improve access to the world for people with disabilities. Lasecki received his PhD and MS from the University of Rochester in 2015 and a BS in computer science and mathematics from Virginia Tech in 2010. He has previously held visiting research positions at CMU, Stanford, Microsoft Research, and Google X.

Kristin Lauter is a principal researcher and research manager for the cryptography group at Microsoft Research. Her personal research interests include algorithmic number theory, elliptic curve, pairing-based and lattice-based cryptography, homomorphic encryption, post-quantum cryptography, and cloud security and privacy.

Lauter is currently serving as past president of the Association for Women in Mathematics, and on the council of the American Mathematical Society. She was selected to be a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2014. She was a cofounder of the Women in Numbers network and is also an affiliate professor in the department of mathematics at the University of Washington. In 2008, Lauter, together with her coauthors, was awarded the Selfridge Prize in computational number theory.

Percy Liang is an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University. He holds a BS from MIT and a PhD from UC, Berkeley. His research interests include modeling natural language semantics and developing machine learning methods that infer rich latent structures from limited supervision. His awards include the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (2016), an NSF CAREER Award (2016), a Sloan Research Fellowship (2015), a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2014), and the best student paper at the International Conference on Machine Learning (2008).

Rangan Majumder is the group program manager for search and artificial intelligence in the Bing division. His team uses AI techniques such as machine learning to solve customer and business problems across various products including finding what you are looking for on the web through Bing and answering open domain questions through Cortana. He also manages the search platform that runs all the complex algorithms, including large deep learning models, to keep Bing running at high scale with low latency and high availability.

Daniel McDuff is a researcher at Microsoft and works on scalable tools to enable the automated recognition and analysis of emotions and physiology. He is also a visiting scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. McDuff completed his PhD in the affective computing group at the MIT Media Lab in 2014 and has a BA and MS from Cambridge University. Previously, McDuff was director of research at Affectiva and a post-doctoral research affiliate at the MIT Media Lab. During his PhD, he built state-of-the-art facial expression recognition software and led the analysis of the world’s largest database of facial expression videos. His work has received nominations and awards from Popular Science magazine as one of the top inventions in 2011, South-by-South-West Interactive (SXSWi), The Webby Awards, ESOMAR, and the Center for Integrated Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT). His projects have been reported in many publications including The Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, BBC News, New Scientist, and Forbes magazine. McDuff was named a 2015 WIRED Innovation Fellow and has spoken at TEDx Berlin.

Louis-Philippe Morency is assistant professor in the Language Technology Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where he leads the Multimodal Communication and Machine Learning Laboratory (MultiComp Lab). He was formerly research assistant professor in the Computer Sciences Department at University of Southern California (USC) and research scientist at USC Institute for Creative Technologies. Morency received his PhD and Master’s degrees from MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research focuses on building the computational foundations that enable computers to analyze, recognize, and predict subtle human communicative behaviors during social interactions. In particular, Morency was lead co-investigator for the multi-institution effort that created SimSensei and MultiSense, two technologies to automatically assess nonverbal behavior indicators of psychological distress. He is currently chair of the advisory committee for ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction and associate editor at IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.

Meredith Ringel Morris is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, where she is affiliated with the Ability, Enable, and neXus research teams. She is also an affiliate faculty member at the University of Washington, in both the department of computer science and engineering and the School of Information. Morris earned a PhD in computer science from Stanford University in 2006, and did her undergraduate work in computer science at Brown University. Her primary research area is human-computer interaction, specifically computer-supported cooperative work and social computing. Her current research focuses on the intersection of computer-supported cooperative work and social computing (CSCW) and accessibility, creating technologies that facilitate people with disabilities in connecting with others in social and professional contexts. Past research contributions include work in facilitating cooperative interactions in the domain of surface computing, and in supporting collaborative information retrieval via collaborative web search and friendsourcing.

Besmira Nushi is a researcher at the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research Redmond. Nushi obtained her PhD from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, where she did research in the intersection of machine learning and human computation. Prior to her PhD studies, she completed a double-degree master’s program in computer science as an Erasmus Mundus scholar at the University of Trento (Italy) and RWTH University of Aachen (Germany). Her work focuses on the integration of machine computation and collective crowd intelligence for solving problems that are difficult to solve otherwise. Her research interests include machine learning, crowdsourcing, integrative intelligent systems, human-computer interaction, and data management.

Sayan Pathak, PhD, is a principal machine learning scientist in the Cognitive Toolkit (formerly CNTK) team at Microsoft. He has published and commercialized cutting-edge computer vision and machine learning technology applied to medical imaging, neuroscience, computational advertising, and social network domains. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked at Allen Institute for Brain Science. He has been a consultant to several startups and principal investigator on several US National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants. He has been a faculty member at the University of Washington for 15 years and has been affiliate professor in CSE at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India, for more than four years.

Christopher Potts is professor of linguistics and Computer Science, and director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), at Stanford. In his research, he uses computational methods to explore how emotion is expressed in language and how linguistic production and interpretation are influenced by the context of utterance. He is the author of the 2005 book The Logic of Conventional Implicatures as well as numerous scholarly papers in computational and theoretical linguistics. He received his PhD in linguistics from the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Dr. Yanmin Qian is an associate professor in Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), China. He received his PhD in the department of electronic engineering from Tsinghua University, China. He was an assistant professor in the department of computer science and engineering in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and also worked as an associate researcher at the speech group in Cambridge University engineering department, UK. Today, he is an associate professor at SJTU. He was one of the key members to design and implement the Cambridge Multi-Genre Broadcast (MGB) Speech Processing system, which won all four tasks of the first MGB Challenge in 2015. He is a member of IEEE and ISCA. He has published more than 60 papers on speech and language processing. His current research interests include acoustic and language modeling in speech recognition, speaker and language recognition, speech separation, natural language understanding, deep learning and multi-media signal processing.

Gireeja Ranade is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, working with the theory group and the adaptive systems and interaction group. She has been a lecturer in electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) at UC Berkeley, where she received her MS and PhD. She also holds an SB in EECS from MIT. Her research interests include control for autonomous systems, information theory, wireless communications, brain-machine interfaces, and crowdsourcing.

Alan Ritter is an assistant professor in computer science at Ohio State University. His research interests include natural language processing, social media analysis, and machine learning. Ritter completed his PhD at the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University. He has received an NDSEG fellowship, a best student paper award at IUI, an NSF CRII, and has served as an area chair for ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL.

Harry Shum (opens in new tab), PhD, is executive vice president of Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Research group.

He is responsible for driving the company’s overall AI strategy and forward-looking research and development efforts spanning infrastructure, services, apps and agents. He oversees AI-focused product groups—the Information Platform Group, Bing, and Cortana product groups—and the ambient computing and robotics teams.

He also leads Microsoft Research, one of the world’s premier computer science research organizations, and its integration with the engineering teams across the company.

Previously, Shum served as the corporate vice president responsible for Bing search product development from 2007 to 2013. Prior to that, he oversaw the research activities at Microsoft Research Asia and the lab’s collaborations with universities in the Asia-Pacific region, and was responsible for the Internet Services Research Center, an applied research organization dedicated to advanced technology investment in search and advertising at Microsoft. He joined Microsoft Research in 1996 as a researcher.

Shum is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow for his contributions to computer vision and computer graphics. He received his PhD in robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. In 2017, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering of the United States.

Mel Slater, DSc, is an ICREA research professor at the University of Barcelona in psychology. He has been professor of virtual environments at University College London since 1997 in the department of computer science. He has been involved in research in virtual reality since the early 1990s, and since 1989 has been supervisor of 38 PhDs in graphics and virtual reality. In 2005 he was awarded the Virtual Reality Career Award by IEEE Virtual Reality “In Recognition of Seminal Achievements in Engineering Virtual Reality.” He held a European Research Council grant TRAVERSE. He is field editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI, and chief editor of the Virtual Environments section. He has contributed to the scientific study of virtual reality and to technical development of this field including its applications in clinical psychology and the cognitive neuroscience of how the brain represents the body. He is a founder of the company Virtual Bodyworks S.L. and is currently Immersive Fellow at Digital Catapult London.

Dawn Song is a professor in the department of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. Her research interest lies in deep learning and security. She is the recipient of various awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, the George Tallman Ladd Research Award, the Okawa Foundation Research Award, the Li Ka Shing Foundation Women in Science Distinguished Lecture Series Award, the Faculty Research Award from IBM, Google and other major tech companies, and best paper awards from top conferences. She obtained her PhD degree from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining UC Berkeley, she was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Krysta Svore is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, where she manages the Quantum Architectures and Computation (QuArC) group. Svore’s research includes the development and implementation of quantum algorithms, including the design of a scalable, fault-tolerant software architecture for translating a high-level quantum program into a low-level, device-specific quantum implementation, and the study of quantum error correction codes and noise thresholds. She has also developed machine-learning methods for web applications, including ranking, classification, and summarization algorithms. Svore received an ACM Best of 2013 Notable Article award. In 2010, she was a member of the winning team of the Yahoo! Learning to Rank Challenge. She received her PhD in computer science with highest distinction from Columbia University in 2006 and her BA from Princeton University in Mathematics and French in 2001. She is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), serves as a representative for the Academic Alliance of the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT), and is an active member of the American Physical Society (APS).

Milind Tambe is the Helen N. and Emmett H. Jones Professor in Engineering at University of Southern California (USC) and founding codirector of CAIS, the USC Center for AI in Society. He is a fellow of AAAI and ACM, and recipient of ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award, Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation Homeland Security Award, INFORMS Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice, Rist Prize of the Military Operations Research Society, as well as influential paper award and multiple best paper awards at conferences such as AAMAS, IJCAI, IAAI, and IVA. Tambe’s pioneering real-world deployments of his “security games” research based on computational game theory has led him and his team to receive commendations from the US Coast Guard, the US Federal Air Marshals Service, and LA Airport Police. He has also cofounded a company based on his research, Avata Intelligence, where he serves as the director of research.

Indrani Medhi Thies is a researcher in the technology for emerging markets group at Microsoft Research in Bangalore, India. Her research interests are in the areas of user interfaces, user experience design, and information and communication technologies for global development. Thies’ primary work has been in user interfaces for low-literate and novice technology users, in which she is considered a world expert. Her recent work is in user experience of conversational agents, mainly chatbots. Thies’ distinctions include the 2017 ACM SIGCHI Social Impact award, an MIT TR35 award, ACM SIGCHI and ACM CSCW best paper honorable mentions, a “Young Indian Leader” award from CNN IBN, and being featured on the list of Fortune magazine’s 2010 “50 Smartest People in Technology”. Thies has a PhD from the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay, India.

Matthias Troyer is a principal researcher in the Quantum Architectures and Computation (QuArC) Group at Microsoft Research. He received his PhD in 1994 from ETH Zurich, and held a postdoctoral position at the University of Tokyo. He has been professor of computational physics at ETH Zurich until taking a leave of absence to join the Microsoft quantum computing program at the beginning of 2017. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics, and recipient of the Rahman Prize for Computational Physics of the American Physical Society. His research interests span from high-performance computing and quantum computing to the simulations of quantum devices and island ecosystems.

Lucy Vanderwende’s research focuses on the acquisition and representation of semantic information, specifically the implicit meaning inferred from explicit signals, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. Vanderwende holds a PhD in computational linguistics from Georgetown University. Lucy worked at IBM Bethesda on natural language processing, and was a visiting scientist at the Institute for Systems Science in Singapore. Vanderwende was program cochair for NAACL in 2009 and general chair for NAACL in 2013. She is also affiliate associate faculty at University of Washington Department of Biomedical Health Informatics, and a member of the UW BioNLP group (opens in new tab), which is using NLP technology to extract critical information from patient reports.

Santosh Vempala is a distinguished professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His main work has been in the area of theoretical computer science. Vempala attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his PhD. In 1997, he was awarded a Miller Fellowship at Berkeley, and was subsequently a professor at MIT in the mathematics department, and then moved to Georgia Tech. His work has been in the areas of algorithms, randomized algorithms, computational geometry, and computational learning theory. He has authored books on random projection and spectral methods. Vempala has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Sloan Fellowship, and was listed in Georgia Trend’s 40 under 40. He was named a Fellow of ACM in 2015.

Evelyne Viegas is a director, artificial intelligence, at Microsoft. In her current role, she creates initiatives that focus on intelligent information as an enabler of innovation, working in partnership with business groups, universities and government agencies worldwide. In particular, she develops AI programs that encourage AI experimentation via cloud-based services, and emphasize the notion of co-opetitions, or collaborative competitions, to drive open innovation.

Prior to her present role, Viegas was a technical lead at Microsoft delivering natural language processing components to Microsoft Office and Windows. Before that, she completed her PhD in France and worked on machine translation as a principal investigator at the Computing Research Laboratory in New Mexico. Viegas serves on international editorial, program and award committees.

Mike Walker is a principal researcher at Microsoft working on security AI. Prior to joining Microsoft, Mike led DARPA’s Cyber Grand Challenge, a two-year, $60 million contest to construct and complete the first prototypes of reasoning cyberdefense AI. In 2016 at the DEF CON hacking contest, these prototypes took their first flight into the game of hackers, Capture the Flag (CTF), landing zero-day exploits and writing patches in a fully autonomous battle. Walker has worked in a policy advisory role, testifying to the President’s Commission on Cybersecurity and serving as contributor and panelist to Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) Surviving on a Diet of Poisoned Fruit. Prior to DARPA, he worked as a research lab leader and principal vulnerability researcher focusing on bringing the power of supercomputer-based automation to the field of software safety. Walker has played in DEF CON CTF finals, coached CTF teams, and built CTFs throughout his career.

Nathan Wiebe is a researcher in quantum computing who focuses on quantum methods for machine learning and simulation of physical systems. His work has provided the first quantum algorithms for deep learning, least squares fitting, quantum simulations using linear-combinations of unitaries, Hamiltonian learning, and efficient Bayesian phase estimation, and he also has pioneered the use of particle filters for characterizing quantum devices as well as many other contributions. He is currently a researcher in the Microsoft Research Station Q, Quantum Architectures and Computing Group (QuArC).

Jason D. Williams has published more than 55 peer-reviewed papers on dialog systems and related areas, and has received five best paper/presentation awards for work on statistical approaches to dialog systems, including the use of POMDPs (partially observable Markov decision processes), reinforcement learning, turn taking, and empirical user studies. In 2012, he initiated the Dialog State Tracking Challenge series; in 2014, he shipped components of the first release of Microsoft Cortana; and in 2015, he launched Microsoft Language Understanding Intelligent Service (opens in new tab). He is president of SIGDIAL, and an elected member of the IEEE Speech and Language Technical Committee (SLTC) in the area of spoken dialog systems. Prior to Microsoft, Williams held positions at AT&T Labs Research, Tellme Networks, and McKinsey. Over the past 15 years, his systems have conducted tens of millions of dialogs with real users.

Dr. Cha Zhang is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, and he currently manages the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) team. He received BS and MS degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China both in electronic engineering, and holds a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Before joining the CNTK team, he spent more than 10 years developing audio/image/video processing and machine learning techniques, and has published over 80 technical papers and holds 20+ US patents. He won the best paper award at ICME 2007 and the best student paper award at ICME 2010. He was the program co-chair for VCIP 2012, and the general co-chair for ICME 2016. He currently serves as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, and IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.

Song-Chun Zhu is professor of statistics and computer science at UCLA, and director of the UCLA Center for Vision, Learning, Cognition, and Autonomy. He received a PhD from Harvard University in 1996, and has worked in vision, learning, cognition, natural language processing, AI, cognitive robots, and more. His work in computer vision received the D. Marr Prize in 2003 for image parsing (with Tu et al.), Marr Prize honorary nominations in 1999 for texture modeling and in 2007 for object modeling (with Y. Wu et al.). He received the J.K. Aggarwal prize from the International Association of Pattern Recognition in 2008 for “contributions to a unified foundation for visual pattern conceptualization, modeling, learning, and inference.” He received the Helmholtz Test-of-Time Prize at ICCV 2013. As a junior faculty member, he received the Sloan Fellow in Computer Science, NSF Career Award, and ONR Young Investigator Award in 2001. He is a fellow of the IEEE Computer Society since 2011. He is leading two consecutive Office of Naval Research Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives projects on scene/event understanding and commonsense reasoning, respectively. He has twice served as a general chair for the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, in 2012 and 2019.

Roy Zimmermann is a director in Microsoft Research Outreach where he leads special initiatives and helps strengthen Microsoft institutional relationships with universities and other partners around the world. Roy works with research and product groups inside Microsoft to help amplify their work and strengthen and foster new research partnerships and relationships with universities, governments, industry, and other organizations around the world.

Prior to joining Microsoft, Zimmerman spent 11 years working with public and private sector partners and universities in countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East helping to increase access to and improve the quality of education through appropriate uses of technology. He spent five years working with public television and PBS Kids developing new educational media and children’s television programming. Zimmerman has worked as a classroom teacher in the United States and overseas with the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea. He received a PhD in education from UCLA, where his research focused on effective integration of technology in secondary schools.