Sendhil Mullainathan is the Roman Family University Professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a Professor of Economics and the Peter de Florez Professor of EECS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His work bridges machine learning , behavioral science , and computational medicine , focusing on social problems like discrimination , poverty , and health equity . Research Interests : Behavioral economics, algorithmic fairness, poverty, AI in healthcare, and policy evaluation. Teaching : Courses on Artificial Intelligence and Algorithmic Solutions to Human Problems. Publications : Over 150 papers in journals like Science , Quarterly Journal of Economics , and Nature Medicine , with recent work on AI-driven healthcare disparities and behavioral economics. Scientific Awards : MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant, Infosys Prize, ‘Top 100 Thinker’ (Foreign Policy Magazine), ‘Young Global Leader’ (World Economic Forum). Organizations : Co-founder of ideas42 (behavioral science non-profit), J-PAL (randomized trials in development), and Dandelion Health (healthcare data for AI). Serves on the MacArthur Foundation board.
Jose Apesteguia is an ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. His research focuses on behavioral economics, decision theory, experimental economics, and game theory, with particular emphasis on topics such as behavioral heterogeneity, rationality measures, stochastic choice models, and social preferences. Apesteguia has collaborated extensively with scholars like Miguel A. Ballester and Jörg Oechssler, producing influential work on topics ranging from imitation dynamics to the impact of language on moral decisions. His research integrates theoretical frameworks with experimental methods, exploring how individuals make decisions under uncertainty, time preferences, and social contexts. Key contributions include the development of measures of rationality and welfare, as well as analyses of behavioral adaptation and the role of information in competitive environments. His work frequently bridges economic theory with empirical validation, addressing real-world issues such as rule compliance in public institutions and team performance in organizations. Apesteguia’s publications span top journals including the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics , Journal of Economic Theory , and Econometrica . He teaches advanced courses on bounded rationality and behavioral decision theory at the undergraduate and graduate levels. His research has been applied to fields like finance (e.g., copy trading behavior) and public policy (e.g., promoting compliance in libraries).
Luca De Benedictis is a Professor of International Economics and Network Analysis at the University of Macerata's Department of Economics and Law. His research focuses on international trade empirics, including trade specialization measurement, network analysis, and causal models. He has authored numerous articles on topics like gravity models, migration impacts, and historical trade networks. His work spans journals such as the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and Network Science . He teaches courses in International Economics and Network Analysis. His research interests include economic geography, policy evaluation, and applied econometrics. Notable projects include analyzing the Erasmus Program's inclusivity, Roman road networks' legacy, and immigration's effect on trade. De Benedictis has secured funding from EU initiatives like COSTNET and GeComplexity, focusing on network data science and economic systems. He serves on editorial boards of journals like Italian Economic Journal and Journal of Historical Network Research . His work bridges theoretical models with empirical applications in trade, migration, and policy.
Tim Conley is Professor and Chair at the Department of Economics, University of Western Ontario. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1996). His research focuses on applied econometrics with emphasis on spatial dependence, cross-sectional analysis, and empirical industrial organization. His primary research interests include methodological development in econometrics, particularly around dependence modeling in cross-sectional data and spatial analysis techniques. He has made significant contributions to understanding technology adoption in developing economies and detection of collusion in market mechanisms. Professor Conley's publications demonstrate consistent focus on developing robust statistical methods for economic applications, with recent work emphasizing practical applications in policy evaluation and market analysis. His methodological innovations have been implemented in statistical software packages used by researchers worldwide.
Murat Erdogdu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, jointly appointed in the Department of Computer Science and Department of Statistical Sciences . He is also a faculty member at the Vector Institute and holds the CIFAR Chair in Artificial Intelligence . PhD in Statistics, Stanford University (advised by Mohsen Bayati and Andrea Montanari) MSc in Computer Science, Stanford University BSc in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics, Bogazici University His research focuses on machine learning theory , high-dimensional statistics , and optimization . He has contributed to understanding gradient-based algorithms, sampling methods, and feature learning in structured data. Recent publications address problems in: Heavy-tailed sampling Mean-field Langevin dynamics Robust feature learning Minimax regression Stochastic optimization under infinite noise Scientific Awards: CIFAR Chair in Artificial Intelligence ICLR 2023 Spotlight NeurIPS 2019 & 2021 Spotlights He teaches graduate courses like STA 414/2104 (Statistical Methods for Machine Learning II) and STA 4273 (Modern Learning Theory) , emphasizing probabilistic modeling and theoretical analysis.
Baharan Mirzasoleiman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she leads the BigML research group. Prior to joining UCLA, she was a postdoctoral research fellow in Computer Science at Stanford University working with Jure Leskovec. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from ETH Zurich advised by Andreas Krause. Her research focuses on addressing sustainability, reliability, and efficiency of machine learning, with particular emphasis on improving big data quality by developing theoretically rigorous methods to select the most beneficial data for efficient and robust learning. Her work spans several critical areas including data efficiency, robustness against label noise and data poisoning, and addressing spurious correlations in machine learning models. She has made significant contributions to understanding how neural networks exploit spurious features that correlate with certain categories during training but fail to generalize to minority groups. Professor Mirzasoleiman's research demonstrates how theoretically grounded approaches can lead to practical improvements in model robustness and efficiency across various applications including medical diagnosis and environmental sensing. Her work has resulted in the development of the SpuCo package, a Python library that provides modular implementations of state-of-the-art methods to address spurious correlations, along with controllable synthetic datasets like SpuCoMNIST and large-scale vision datasets like SpuCoAnimals. She has received numerous prestigious awards including the ETH medal for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis, being selected as a Rising Star in EECS by MIT, an NSF Career Award, a UCLA Hellman Fellows Award, and an Okawa Research Award. Her students have also received multiple fellowships and awards including Amazon Doctoral Student Fellowships and an OpenAI Superalignment Fast Grant. Professor Mirzasoleiman actively contributes to the academic community through invited talks at major conferences including ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, and KDD, as well as co-organizing workshops on new frontiers in adversarial machine learning and sparsity in neural networks. She has developed educational resources including tutorials on Foundations of Data-efficient Learning presented at ICML 2024.
Stefano NASINI is an Associate Professor at the University of Lille 3, specializing in Quantitative Methods within the Economics and Mathematics Sciences. He holds a HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) from the University of Lille 3 (2021), a Ph.D. in Statistics and Operations Research from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (2015), and a Master in Statistics (2011). His research focuses on optimization, complex networks, statistical inference, and microeconomic applications. He has held academic positions including a post-doctoral role at IESE Business School (2014–2016) and a visiting researcher role at the University of Lisbon (2014). His work spans scheduling optimization, network analysis, financial contagion modeling, and energy system planning. Key contributions include specialized algorithms for large-scale optimization problems and frameworks for decentralized portfolio management. He is a member of the LEM research group and teaches courses in optimization, econometrics, and social network analysis at the Grande École and MSc levels. Publications highlight interdisciplinary applications, including network-based diffusion models, multi-market financial strategies, and dynamic choice analysis. His research bridges theoretical advancements in operations research with practical challenges in economics, energy, and transportation systems. No scientific awards are explicitly listed in the provided materials. His advising roles and grants are not detailed here, but his extensive publication record reflects active collaboration within academic and applied domains.
Rina Dechter is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), affiliated with the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS). She specializes in automated reasoning, probabilistic and constraint-based graphical models, and causal inference. Dechter has held leadership roles, including Co-Editor-in-Chief of Artificial Intelligence since 2011 and editorial board memberships in journals such as the Constraint Journal and Journal of Machine Learning Research . Education : Ph.D., Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) M.S., Applied Mathematics, Weizmann Institute B.S., Mathematics and Statistics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Research Interests : Dechter’s work focuses on computational aspects of automated reasoning, constraint processing, probabilistic reasoning, and causal inference. She develops efficient algorithms for graphical models, emphasizing tractable reasoning tasks and anytime search strategies. Her recent projects include causal decision-making frameworks funded by a $5M NSF grant. Awards : Presidential Young Investigator Award (1991) AAAI Fellow (1994) ACP Research Excellence Award (2007) ACM Fellow (2013) Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2025) Grants & Collaborations : She leads a multi-institutional NSF-funded project on causal foundations of AI decision-making. Her work emphasizes trustworthiness in AI through causal models, with applications in robotics and public health.
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.
Alexandre RUBESAM is an Associate Professor at IÉSEG School of Management (France), specializing in Finance with a focus on asset pricing, financial econometrics, and quantitative trading. He holds a Ph.D. in Finance from Cass Business School (UK), an MSc in Statistics from the State University of Campinas (Brazil), and a Bachelor in Statistics from the same university. Education: Ph.D., Finance, Cass Business School, UK (2008) MSc., Statistics, State University of Campinas, Brazil (2004) Bachelor, Statistics, State University of Campinas, Brazil (2001) His research interests span behavioral finance, risk management, machine learning applications in finance, and portfolio optimization. Notably, he explores topics like market herding during crises, volatility forecasting, and the low-beta anomaly through behavioral lenses. Prof. Rubesam has authored influential papers on information transmission in financial markets, risk parity strategies, and the efficacy of linear models in volatility prediction. His work bridges theoretical finance with practical applications, such as developing machine learning-based portfolio construction methods for emerging markets. Awards: 2007 Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Prize 2006 Best Paper Award, Cass Business School His professional roles include Chief Risk Officer at Itaú-Unibanco (2013–2017) and Quantitative Researcher/Trader at Principia Capital Management (2009–2011). He is a member of LEM (Laboratory of Economics and Management) and teaches courses on financial programming, risk management, and portfolio analysis.
Satoshi Tomioka is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware, affiliated with the College of Arts & Sciences. He holds a B.A. from International Christian University (Tokyo) and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His expertise spans semantics, pragmatics, syntax, and prosody, with a focus on Japanese and comparative East Asian linguistics. Education: B.A. in Liberal Arts (1987), International Christian University; Ph.D. in Linguistics (1997), University of Massachusetts Amherst. Research interests include ellipsis, anaphora, wh-interrogatives, distributivity, and contrastiveness. He investigates how prosody interacts with syntax and semantics in Japanese, exploring topics like focus marking, intervention effects, and scalar implicatures. Recent work examines associative plurals and pragmatic disambiguation in embedded questions. Publications analyze theoretical and empirical questions in linguistic interfaces, such as Bare quotatives as embedded speech acts (2024) and Focus without pitch boost (2022). His work bridges formal semantics and experimental approaches, addressing challenges in cross-linguistic typology and cognitive aspects of language processing.
Réka Albert is a Distinguished Professor of Physics at Pennsylvania State University, affiliated with the Eberly College of Science. Her research focuses on the application of network science to biological systems, including signal transduction networks, ecological interactions, and cancer systems biology. She holds editorial roles at npj Systems Biology and Applications , IET Systems Biology , and Bulletin of Mathematical Biology . Education: Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Notre Dame (2001), M.S. and B.S. from Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania (1995-1996). Research Interests: Modeling complex systems using network theory; Boolean network analysis of biological pathways; ecological community dynamics; systems-level understanding of disease mechanisms (e.g., cancer, AML). Her work bridges theoretical physics, computational biology, and experimental data to predict system behavior and therapeutic strategies. Awards: External member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (2016), APS Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award (2011), NSF CAREER Award (2007), and Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2004). Grants/Support: NSF awards (MCB 1715826, IIS 1814405), ARO MURI on hyperuniform systems, and collaborations with biologists like Sarah Assmann (plant signaling) and Katriona Shea (ecology). Labs/Teams: Leads a multidisciplinary research group at Penn State, mentoring over 20 PhD alumni and current students like Eli Newby and Fatemeh Nasrollahi. Active in developing tools like pystablemotifs for Boolean network analysis.
Michal Kolesár is a Professor in the Department of Economics at Princeton University , holding this position since July 2020. Previously, he served as Assistant Professor (2014-2020) with dual appointments in Economics and the Woodrow Wilson School (2018-2020), and as Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT (2016-2017). His research focuses on econometrics , particularly causal inference , instrumental variables , nonparametric regression , and robust statistical methods . His work addresses fundamental challenges in high-dimensional data analysis, treatment effect heterogeneity, and finite-sample inference validity. Current projects include developing bias-aware methods for regularized regression and analyzing dynamic causal effects in nonlinear systems. Kolesár's recent publications reveal a strong emphasis on methodological rigor with practical applications. His work spans instrumental variable techniques (addressing contamination bias, weak identification), regression discontinuity designs (discrete running variables, measurement error), and high-dimensional inference (sparsity fragility, honest confidence intervals). Key recurring themes include finite-sample optimality, coverage probability guarantees, and robustness to model misspecification. Fellow of the International Association for Applied Econometrics (2023) Journal of Econometrics best associate editor award (2023) Sloan Research Fellowship (2019) NSF grants for high-dimensional data inference (2021-2025) and nonparametric regression (2016-2019) Graduate Economics Club teaching awards (2017, 2018) As an educator, Kolesár teaches advanced econometrics courses at both undergraduate (ECO 312, ECO 313) and graduate levels (ECO 517, ECO 519, ECO 539b). He serves as Co-editor of the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics (2024-2027) and sits on editorial boards of Econometrica , American Economic Journal: Applied Economics , and others. His professional activities include extensive peer review for top journals and organization of major econometrics conferences including the 2026 Econometric Society Winter Meeting.
Andre Wibisono serves as Assistant Professor in Yale University's Department of Computer Science with a secondary appointment in Statistics & Data Science, joining the faculty in 2021 after postdoctoral research at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Georgia Institute of Technology. His educational background includes: Ph.D. in Computer Science, UC Berkeley M.A. in Statistics, UC Berkeley M.Eng. in Computer Science, MIT S.B. in Mathematics and Computer Science, MIT Wibisono's research focuses on algorithm design for machine learning through optimization, sampling, and game theory , leveraging dynamical systems and information theory to develop accelerated discrete-time algorithms from continuous dynamics. His work provides theoretical foundations for efficient machine learning systems with applications in generative modeling and constrained optimization. Recent publications (2023-2025) demonstrate consistent innovation in Hamiltonian-based optimization , constrained-space sampling , and min-max game convergence , characterized by rigorous mathematical analysis connecting continuous dynamics to discrete algorithms. Key trends include randomized integration for acceleration, phi-divergence convergence guarantees, and symplectic geometry applications to mirror descent. Scientific recognition includes: NSF CAREER Award for developing algorithmic frameworks bridging continuous and discrete dynamics He actively mentors current students (Siddharth Mitra, Kaylee Yang, Jane Lee, Qiang Fu, Peter Wang) and has guided two postdocs to faculty positions. Research is funded through the NSF CAREER award and collaborative CIF grants focused on Hamiltonian dynamics for sampling and optimization. His Yale research group develops theoretical foundations for next-generation machine learning algorithms, emphasizing mathematical rigor in optimization and sampling with applications to generative modeling and constrained inference problems.
Linyi Li is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University (SFU), leading the Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (TAI) Lab. His research focuses on certifiably trustworthy deep learning systems, combining machine learning and computer security. He holds a PhD from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and a B.Eng. from Tsinghua University. Affiliations: Simon Fraser University, TAI Lab Education: PhD in Computer Science, UIUC, 2023 B.Eng (Cum Laude), Tsinghua University, 2018 His research interests include deep learning , trustworthy machine learning , large language models , and software engineering . He emphasizes rigorous certification of robustness, fairness, and numerical reliability in AI systems. Recent work includes the InfiBench benchmark for evaluating code LLMs and advancements in neural network verification. Recent Research Trends: His publications span certified robustness, fairness guarantees, and scalable verification techniques for deep learning models. He also explores scientific evaluation of foundation models and adversarial defense mechanisms. Awards: Rising Stars in Data Science AdvML Rising Star Award Wing Kai Cheng Fellowship Finalist: Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (2022) Winner: VNN-COMP'23 Competition (Team α, β-CROWN) Advising & Grants: As a PI, he oversees the TAI Lab's research. Though no specific grants are listed, his work is funded through competitive awards and university resources. Labs/Teams: Leads the TAI Lab at SFU, focusing on foundational and applied research in trustworthy AI.
