Michael S. Brown is a Professor and Canada Research Chair at York University's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). He also serves as Senior Director at the Samsung AI Center in Toronto, Canada. His research focuses on computer vision, image processing, and computer graphics, with a deep specialization in camera imaging pipelines, color theory, and AI-driven ISP optimization. He has organized major conferences like ProCams, eHeritage, WACV, and ICCV, and holds editorial roles in journals like TPAMI and IJCV. He is renowned for his work on computational color constancy, ISP hardware algorithms, and AI-based image enhancement techniques. His recent ICCV 2023 tutorial detailed modern camera pipelines and AI applications in ISP components. His research is supported by grants from NSERC, Samsung, Adobe, Google, and Microsoft. Brown advises numerous graduate students and has mentored over 30 alumni now in academia and industry roles at Meta, Samsung, Microsoft, and startups. His lab focuses on camera systems, noise modeling, and cross-platform color management, with contributions to open-source datasets and software platforms for ISP experimentation.
Zhiyong Huang is an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS) School of Computing. He holds multiple leadership roles, including Deputy Director of the NUS Business Analytics Centre, Director of the Computing Translational Research & Development (C-TReND) Centre, and Assistant Dean (Industry Relations). He is also a Senior Principal Investigator at the NUS Chongqing Research Institute. Education: PhD in Computer Science from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), MEng and BEng in Computer Engineering from Tsinghua University. Leadership: Senior Member of ACM and IEEE, Pioneer Member of ACM SIGGRAPH, and Chair of the Singapore ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter. Research Interests: His work spans Data Analytics, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Human-Robot Interaction, and Computer Graphics. Key projects include the NUS Digital Twin initiative and secure data analytics pipelines. Article Trends: Recent publications focus on time series generation, cryptocurrency benchmarks, medical image registration, and phishing detection. These works integrate machine learning, computer vision, and multimodal systems. Scientific Awards: Finalist, World Technology Summit & Awards (Entertainment, 2010) Bronze, National Science and Technology Progress Award (1992) Tsinghua 12.9 Distinguished Young Teacher Award (1989) Grants & Service: Extensive involvement in Singapore's IT Standards Committee, review panels for EDB SIIRD projects, and editorial roles. He has served as PC co-chair, local chair, and reviewer for numerous conferences and journals.
Professor Gabriel Brostow is a faculty member in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL), where he leads research in Computer Vision and Human-Computer Interaction. He also serves as Chief Research Scientist and Senior Director of the R&D Team at Niantic, the company behind Pokémon GO. His work bridges academic research and industry applications, focusing on developing AI systems that enhance human capabilities through what he terms 'Human in the Loop AI'—now commonly referred to as Human-Centered AI. Brostow completed his BS in Electrical Engineering at UT Austin, followed by a PhD with Irfan Essa at Georgia Tech. He then pursued postdoctoral research with Roberto Cipolla's Computer Vision & Robotics Group at Cambridge University as a Marshall Sherfield Fellow, and with Marc Pollefeys in ETH Zurich's CVG Group. His research explores how AI, particularly Computer Vision, can serve as 'super-tools' for professionals across various domains including filmmaking, architecture, robotics, and scientific research. Specific interests include assistive technology for everyday life, authoring systems that maximize user effort, 3D reconstruction, depth estimation, and vision-language models. His work often involves creating systems that are validated through real-world human interaction to ensure practical utility. Analysis of his recent publications reveals a strong focus on practical applications of Computer Vision that directly interact with humans. His research spans 3D scene understanding, depth estimation, sketch-based interfaces, and multimodal AI systems. There's a clear emphasis on creating benchmarks and tools that facilitate human-AI collaboration, with applications in assistive technology, urban planning, filmmaking, and biodiversity monitoring. His work frequently appears at top conferences including CVPR, NeurIPS, ECCV, and CHI. Marshall Sherfield Fellowship Brostow actively mentors PhD students, with current advisees including Ross Murphy, Skanda Koppula, Gizem Unlu, Omiros Pantazis, and Jamie Watson. His alumni include numerous PhD graduates and MSc students who have gone on to successful careers in academia and industry. He emphasizes selecting students based on passion and potential rather than just academic credentials, valuing traits like helpfulness, drive, and hunger to learn. His research is supported through collaborations with major institutions and companies including DeepMind, MIT, and the University of Edinburgh. He leads a research group at UCL that collaborates closely with Niantic's R&D team, creating a unique bridge between academic research and industry application. His team's work frequently involves developing novel Computer Vision techniques that are validated through real-world human interaction, ensuring practical utility alongside technical innovation. The group explores blue-sky research problems with applications ranging from assistive technology to professional tools for filmmakers, architects, and scientists studying diverse environments.
Burak Ozdoganlar is a Ver Planck Endowed Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Associate Director of the Engineering Research Accelerator. He holds courtesy faculty positions in Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering. Ozdoganlar earned his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan (1999), M.S. degrees from Ohio State University (1993, 1995), and a B.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from Istanbul Technical University (1991). Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan (1999) MS, Mechanical Engineering, Ohio State University (1995) MS, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Ohio State University (1993) BS, Aeronautical Engineering, Istanbul Technical University (1991) Ozdoganlar’s research focuses on multi-scale manufacturing processes (macro/micro/nano), precision engineering , structural dynamics , and modal testing , with applications in biomedical device fabrication , microneedle arrays , soft electronics , and 3D ice printing for vascular networks. His work bridges computational modeling with experimental validation. Recent scientific awards include the 2023 AIMBE College of Fellows induction, ASME Fellow (2019), and NSF CAREER Award (2006). He served as interim CTO of the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute and chaired the ASME-MED Manufacturing Equipment Technical Committee. Ozdoganlar leads projects in scalable manufacturing for implantable medical devices , bioelectric medicine , and wearable robotics . His lab develops 3D ice-printed vascular templates for tissue engineering and liquid metal circuits for soft electronics, funded by institutions like the Manufacturing Futures Institute and ARPA-H.
Zhonghai Lu is a Professor of Electronic Systems Design (specializing in Dependable and Autonomous Systems) at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, part of the Department of Electrical Engineering in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). He serves as Program Director for KTH's Embedded Systems master's program and Director of Studies at the Division of Electronics and Embedded Systems. His research focuses on Network-on-Chip (NoC), computer architecture, embedded systems, and Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) of power electronics. He leads a research group exploring in-network processing and embedded intelligence, transforming passive networks into active computational frameworks. Lu holds a BSc from Beijing Normal University (1989), MSc and PhD from KTH (2002, 2007), and an MBA in Innovation and Growth from the University of Turku (2012). He has authored over 240 scientific papers, including journal articles and peer-reviewed conferences, with notable recognitions such as Best Paper Awards at NOCS’2015 and EU HiPEAC, and a Featured Paper in IEEE Transactions on Computers (2020). He serves as Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO) and has chaired major conferences like HiPEAC’2017 and NOCS’2018. His research group’s recent work includes integrating AI into hardware acceleration, fault-tolerant neural networks, and RUL estimation for power electronics using recurrent neural networks. Lu has secured grants from the Swedish Research Council and Intel Corporation and developed courses like IL2230 (Hardware Architectures for Deep Learning) and IL2233 (Embedded Intelligence), pioneering embedded AI education at KTH. Education: BSc (Beijing Normal University), MSc/PhD (KTH), MBA (University of Turku) Awards: Best Paper Awards (NOCS, EU HiPEAC), Swedish Research Council Grants, Intel Research Gifts Labs/Teams: Research Group on In-Network Processing and Embedded Intelligence
Dr. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at The University of British Columbia, with joint appointments in Linguistics and an associate membership in Computer Science. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. His research focuses on deep learning, socio-pragmatics, and speech/language technologies, particularly for Arabic and African languages. He leads the UBC Deep Learning & NLP Group and co-directs SSHRC-funded grants like I Trust AI and Ensuring Full Literacy. He is a founding member of the Center for Artificial Intelligence Decision making and Action and a member of the Institute for Computing, Information, and Cognitive Systems. His work spans automatic speech recognition, machine translation, computational socio-pragmatics, and low-resource language technologies. Notable projects include developing Arabic speech recognition systems, multidialectal Arabic benchmarks, and tools for African language processing. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed papers and leads initiatives like the NADI Arabic Dialect Identification shared task and the NileChat project for culturally-aware LLMs. His research aims to create equitable, socially-aware AI systems for health, social media, and information management.
Hamed Zamani is an Associate Professor at the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences (CICS) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR). He joined UMass Amherst in 2020 after working as a researcher at Microsoft. His research focuses on designing and evaluating statistical and machine learning models for information access systems, including search engines, recommender systems, and question answering. Education: PhD in Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst MS in Computer Engineering, University of Tehran BS in Computer Engineering, University of Tehran Zamani's current research explores neural information retrieval, conversational search, and retrieval-enhanced machine learning. He develops efficient neural models for core IR tasks and emerging areas like conversational information seeking. His work bridges information retrieval with large language models to enhance capabilities in understanding complex queries and generating relevant responses. His recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on retrieval-augmented generation, personalized information access, and efficient neural ranking models. There's a clear trend toward integrating large language models with information retrieval systems, optimizing multi-agent frameworks, and developing evaluation metrics for generative AI applications in search contexts. Scientific Awards: NSF CAREER Award ACM SIGIR Early Career Excellence in Research & Community Engagement Awards (2023) UMass CICS Outstanding Dissertation Award Paper awards at SIGIR (2022, 2023, 2024), CIKM (2020), ICTIR (2019) Microsoft Research Award (AI and New Future of Work program) Amazon Research Award (Optimization of Retrieval-Enhanced ML Models) Zamani actively advises PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, with his students receiving prestigious awards including NSF Graduate Research Fellowships and SIGIR Best Paper awards. He leads the CIIR Talk Series, hosting IR researchers to share recent findings. His Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge team was selected for two consecutive years, advancing task-oriented dialogue systems. He directs research at the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), where he oversees projects in neural retrieval models, conversational AI, and retrieval-augmented generation. The center serves as a hub for developing next-generation information access systems with industry and academic collaborators.
Naresh R. Shanbhag is the Jack Kilby Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He serves as Director of the Systems on Nanoscale Information fabriCs (SONIC) Center and held the D.J. Gandhi Distinguished Visiting Professorship at IIT Mumbai from 2015-2020. Previously, he was a visiting faculty member at National Taiwan University (2007) and Stanford University (2014). Dr. Shanbhag received his doctorate from the University of Minnesota (1993) in Electrical Engineering. From 1993 to 1995, he worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories as the lead chip architect for AT&T's 51.84 Mb/s transceiver chips over twisted-pair wiring for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM)-LAN and very high-speed digital subscriber line (VDSL) chip-sets. His research focuses on the design of energy-efficient machine learning, communications, and signal processing systems on resource-constrained embedded platforms. He explores fundamental trade-offs between energy efficiency, latency and accuracy of decision-making systems implemented in nanoscale technologies, with applications to computer vision, biomedicine, automatic target recognition, and imaging. His work spans four primary focus areas: Resource-efficient Machine Learning for the Edge, In-memory Computing (IMC), Energy-efficient High Data Rate Communications, and Shannon-inspired Statistical Error Compensation (SEC). Analysis of his recent publications reveals a strong emphasis on in-memory computing architectures (SRAM, MRAM, RRAM) for machine learning acceleration. His work consistently addresses energy-accuracy trade-offs, with increasing attention to security aspects of hardware implementations and applications to MIMO signal processing and edge AI systems. His research demonstrates a progression from theoretical foundations to practical silicon implementations. 2024 Semiconductor Research Corporation Innovation Award 2018 Semiconductor Industry Association/Semiconductor Research Corporation University Researcher Award 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems Best Paper Award 2006 IEEE Fellow 1996 National Science Foundation CAREER Award Professor Shanbhag has mentored over 50 graduate students who now work at leading technology companies including Qualcomm, Amazon, Nvidia, Intel, and Apple. His research has been generously supported by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, AFRL, Semiconductor Research Corporation, Texas Instruments, Sandia National Laboratories, and industry partners including IBM, GlobalFoundries, and Intel Corporation. He led the Alternative Computational Models research theme (2006-2012) and was the founding Director of the SONIC Center (2013-2017), a 5-year multi-university center funded by DARPA and SRC. Currently, he leads research themes in the SRC and DARPA funded JUMP 2.0 Program's Center for Co-Design of Cognitive Systems and the Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity, and in the NSF IUCRC Center for Advanced Semiconductor Chips with Accelerated Performance (ASAP). As Director of the Systems on Nanoscale Information fabriCs (SONIC) Center, Professor Shanbhag leads a multidisciplinary team exploring novel computing paradigms for the nanoscale era. His group has benchmarked an extensive collection of in-memory computing and digital accelerator IC designs, maintaining a publicly available IMC benchmarking repository of metrics extracted from published IC prototypes. His research philosophy integrates concepts from information theory, statistical signal processing, detection and estimation, VLSI architectures, and digital and analog integrated circuits to develop energy-efficient systems from algorithms to silicon implementations.
Zeynep Akata is the Liesel Beckmann Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Director of the Institute for Explainable Machine Learning at Helmholtz Munich. Previously she was a W3 Professor at the University of Tübingen (2019-2023) and held faculty and post-doctoral positions at the University of Amsterdam, UC Berkeley and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics. Her research focuses on multimodal learning and explainable artificial intelligence . Education: PhD, University of Grenoble / INRIA Rhône-Alpes, 2014 MSc, RWTH Aachen University, 2010 BSc, Trakya University, Turkey, 2008 Research Interests: Professor Akata’s group develops algorithms that learn from vision, language and other modalities simultaneously, with a strong emphasis on zero-shot, few-shot and continual learning . A central theme is making decisions interpretable, leading to work on explainable AI, concept bottleneck models, multimodal reasoning and human-aligned representation learning . Recent projects investigate large-scale multimodal language models, dataset distillation, model merging and continual knowledge editing. Publication Trends: Her 2024-2025 publications reveal a shift toward foundational large-scale models (diffusion, LLMs, vision-language transformers) while retaining the core themes of interpretability and generalization under limited supervision . Topics span dataset distillation, model merging, continual learning, fairness auditing of generative models and novel evaluation protocols for zero-shot learning systems. Scientific Awards: Lise-Meitner Award for Excellent Women in Computer Science (2014) Young Scientist Honour, Werner-von-Siemens-Ring Foundation (2019) ERC Starting Grant, European Commission (2019) DAGM German Pattern Recognition Award (2021) ECVA Young Researcher Award (2022) Alfried Krupp Award (2023) Advising & Funding: Prof. Akata currently supervises or co-supervises 25+ PhD students across TUM and the University of Tübingen via ELLIS and IMPRS-IS doctoral programs. She holds major grants including an ERC Starting Grant and DARPA Explainable AI funding, and is a frequent program chair and area chair for premier conferences (CVPR 2024, ECCV 2026, NeurIPS, ICML, etc.). Labs & Teams: She leads the Institute for Explainable Machine Learning at Helmholtz Munich and heads the Multimodal Learning and Explainable AI group at TUM. The institute collaborates closely with the ELLIS Institute Tübingen and Cyber Valley ecosystem, and maintains close ties with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and Informatics.
William Yang Wang serves as the Mellichamp Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2019-present). He directs the UCSB Center for Responsible Machine Learning, the Mind and Machine Intelligence Initiative, and the UCSB NLP Group. His research focuses on theoretical foundations and practical algorithms for AI, particularly in NLP, LLMs, and neuro-symbolic reasoning. PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University Active in AI theory and applications (2016-present) Research interests span multiple AI domains, with special emphasis on NLP and responsible machine learning. He has pioneered datasets like HybridQA, TabFact, and VaTeX, enabling advancements in multi-hop QA, fact verification, and video-language tasks. His work combines statistical relational learning with modern deep learning paradigms. Recent publications center around multimodal reasoning, knowledge graph integration, and responsible AI development. He has received numerous accolades including the IEEE SPS Pierre-Simon Laplace Award (2024) and NSF CAREER Award (2021). Karen Sparck Jones Award (2022) DARPA Young Faculty Award (2018) IBM Faculty Award Mentoring 15+ PhD and postdoc researchers who now hold positions at Microsoft Research, Amazon, Meta GenAI, and academic institutions like Arizona and Rutgers. His lab maintains active collaborations with industry partners through initiatives like ChipAgents.ai, which he founded as CEO.
Huining Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at North Carolina State University . Her research focuses on Internet of Things (IoT) , cybersecurity , and mobile computing , with a specialized emphasis on mobile health (mHealth) technologies. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from University at Buffalo (2024). Her work addresses privacy-preserving sensing mechanisms , biomarker measurement , and fairness in dynamic mobile environments , developing systems for chronic wound care, Parkinson’s disease management, and mental health therapy. Recent publications highlight innovations in mmWave biometrics , machine learning for health diagnostics , and non-contact monitoring . Scientific Awards: Best Paper Awards (SenSys 2019, BodyNet 2021, ICHI 2022) Best Paper Candidate (SenSys 2022) Harold O. Wolf Achievement Award (2024) EECS Rising Star (2023) NIH mHealth Training Institute Scholar (2025) She teaches courses in Mobile Health Systems and Applications and Computer Networks , and actively serves on NSF panels , TPC committees (ACM MobiSys, IEEE-EMBS BSN), and as Associate Editor for journals like Elsevier Smart Health.
Rachel Rudinger is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, affiliated with the Department of Computer Science and the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS). Her research focuses on Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning, and AI ethics, particularly addressing sociocultural biases and fairness in large language models (LLMs). She holds a PhD from Johns Hopkins University (2019) and a B.S. from Yale University (2013). Rudinger's work explores equitable cultural alignment in AI systems, common ground misalignment in dialog systems, and the mutual influence of gender and occupation in LLMs. She received the NSF CAREER Award in 2024 for her project on robust, fair, and culturally aware commonsense reasoning. Her recent publications investigate empathy gaps in LLMs, synthetic data effectiveness in disaster response, and bias measurement techniques across domains. As an advisor, she guides seven PhD students including Christabel Acquaye and Haozhe An. Her research spans diverse topics from legal language analysis to maternal health question answering, reflecting her commitment to interdisciplinary AI ethics. She actively contributes to workshops on commonsense representation and serves as a reviewer for top conferences in NLP and AI.
Yanzhi Wang is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University , affiliated with the Institute for Experiential AI and the Institute for the Wireless Internet of Things . He holds a PhD from the University of Southern California (2014). His research focuses on real-time AI systems, deep neural network compression, neuromorphic computing, and non-von Neumann architectures. Notable projects include NSF-funded initiatives on age-inclusive urban design, superconducting computing (DISCoVER), and edge device optimization (PatDNN). He has received prestigious awards such as the Army Research Office Young Investigator Award and the Constantinos Mavroidis Translational Research Award. His work emphasizes algorithm-hardware co-design for energy efficiency, with grants from NSF, ARO, and industry partners like Google. Recent research trends reflect his focus on accelerating vision transformers, diffusion models, and large language models for edge computing. He has pioneered methods like AutoViT and Fastcar, addressing latency and resource constraints in mobile platforms. Collaborations span academia and industry, driving innovations in superconducting circuits and neuromorphic systems.
José F. Martínez holds the Lee Teng-hui Professorship of Engineering at Cornell University's College of Engineering, where he leads research in computer architecture and systems. His roles include Vice Chair of ACM SIGARCH, IEEE Fellow, and past leadership roles in ISCA, MICRO, and IEEE Computer Society journals. He has received prestigious awards such as the NSF CAREER Award, IBM/Qualcomm Faculty Awards, and multiple teaching accolades including Tau Beta Pi Professor of the Year (2011). Education: Licenciado en Informática de Sistemas (1996), Universidad Politécnica de Valencia M.S. (1999) and Ph.D. (2002) in Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign His research focuses on computer architecture , including microprocessors, multiprocessors, memory subsystems, embedded systems, and processing-in-memory (PIM) innovations. He co-leads the DARPA/SRC ACE Center for Evolvable Computing and NSF's CROPPS Center, and previously co-founded Cornell's Institute for Digital Agriculture (CIDA). His work bridges hardware-software co-design and sustainable computing. Key Contributions: Advancing energy-efficient multiprocessor architectures Developing PIM frameworks like PUMICE and Membrane Market-based resource allocation systems (e.g., XChange, ReBudget) His advising spans over 15 graduate students and has guided Merrill Presidential Scholars. Current research explores evolvable computing paradigms and AI hardware acceleration, reflecting his dual focus on foundational architecture and applied systems innovation.
Raquel Fernández is Full Professor of Computational Linguistics and Dialogue Systems at the University of Amsterdam, where she leads the Dialogue Modelling Group at the Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (ILLC). As Vice-Director for Research at ILLC and a Fellow of the ELLIS Society, she bridges computational linguistics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence through her research on language use in multimodal and conversational contexts. PhD in Computational Linguistics from King's College London Prior research positions at University of Potsdam and Stanford University's CSLI Her work explores how cognitive constraints, social interaction, and perception shape language use, with a focus on: Visually-grounded language processing Multimodal dialogue modeling Model uncertainty and calibration Language grounding in multimodal data Language learning and semantic change Dialogue reference resolution Recent publications analyze multimodal reasoning limitations, cross-lingual knowledge consistency, and uncertainty modeling in dialogue systems. She has received multiple accolades including an ERC Consolidator Grant , NWO VENI/VIDI/Aspasia fellowships , and EMNLP/GenBench awards . Outstanding Paper Award (EMNLP 2023) Best Data Award (GenBench Workshop 2023) ELLIS Society Fellow ERC Consolidator Grant #819455 recipient NWO VENI/VIDI/Aspasia awardee As a leader in academic service, she serves on the SIGDAT Executive Committee and chairs multiple conference committees. Her lab develops models for multimodal dialogue, visual storytelling, and grounded language understanding.
