Olga Papaemmanouil is a Professor of Computer Science at Brandeis University and Senior Associate Provost for Academic Affairs and Curriculum. She is affiliated with the Michtom School of Computer Science and the Volen National Center for Complex Systems. Ph.D. in Computer Science, Brown University (2008) M.S. in Information Systems, University of Economics and Business, Athens (2001) B.S. in Computer Science and Informatics, University of Patras, Greece (1999) Her research focuses on data management, integrating machine learning with cloud databases, query optimization, and performance prediction. She has pioneered techniques for interactive data exploration, reinforcement learning in query scheduling, and economic models for database provisioning. Recent publications highlight her work on learned query optimizers , deep reinforcement learning for database operations, and platform-independent neuroscience data interfaces . NSF Career Award (2013) Amazon Research Award (2019) Huawei Innovation Research Awards (2017, 2018) SIGMOD Best Demonstration Award (2015) Paris Kanellakis Fellowship (2002) She has secured multiple NSF grants and developed systems like Neo (learned query optimizer) and XCloud (performance management for cloud data services). Her work bridges database systems and machine learning for scalable data analytics.
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.
James Glass is a Senior Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and heads the Spoken Language Systems Group within MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is also affiliated with the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. His research spans automatic speech recognition, multimodal learning, and spoken language understanding, with applications in healthcare and video analysis. Education: SM and PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT His work focuses on paralinguistic speech analysis, health markers in speech, and the intersection of speech and natural language processing. Recent trends emphasize audio-visual alignment, recursive reasoning, and AI applications in cognitive disorder diagnosis. Scientific awards include IEEE Fellow, ISCA Fellow, and Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. His group explores unsupervised learning, speaker verification, and social text analysis. James leads the Spoken Language Systems Group at CSAIL, collaborating with institutions like IBM and Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. His research integrates vision-language models, neural audio codecs, and self-supervised frameworks.
Eamonn Keogh is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of California, Riverside. His pioneering work centers on the Matrix Profile, a transformative approach to time series data mining enabling efficient solutions for motif discovery, anomaly detection, and similarity search. His algorithms (STAMP, STOMP, SCRIMP, DAMP, SCAMP) offer exact, parameter-free, and scalable solutions across domains like seismology, bioinformatics, and industrial IoT. Research areas include: Development of ultra-fast algorithms for time series joins and motif discovery at unprecedented scales (breaking the 100 million barrier) GPU acceleration for time series mining Domain-agnostic methods for semantic segmentation and anomaly detection Novel primitives like Time Series Chains, Snippets, and Consensus Motifs His work is highly cited and recognized by industry and academia, with applications ranging from NASA's Cassini mission to detecting BGP anomalies in computer networks.
Yannis Chronis is an incoming Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science , ETH Zurich (starting August 2025), where he will join the ETH Systems Group . Prior to this, he spent 3 years as a Systems Researcher at Google's Systems Research Group in Sunnyvale, USA. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (advised by Prof. Jignesh Patel) and a Bachelor's/Master's from the University of Athens, Greece (advised by Prof. Yannis Ioannidis). His research focuses on optimizing databases and data processing for modern hardware through software-hardware co-design. Key areas include database efficiency in memory-centric architectures, learned query optimizers, and cloud resource management. His work is supported by a Facebook Fellowship and has been recognized with the EDBT 2016 Medal for best paper. Teaching: Taught CS 564 - Database Management Systems at UW-Madison (Spring 2022). Service: Served on program committees for SIGMOD, VLDB, CIDR, and others, and chairs the CIDR Proceedings Committee. Key Publications: His recent work includes studies on memory-centric computing for databases, cardinality estimation benchmarks, and adaptive query processing techniques.
Constantinos Daskalakis is the Armen Avanessians (1982) Professor in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). He joined MIT in 2009 and is a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations Research Center (ORC). His research focuses on theoretical computer science, with emphasis on game theory, machine learning, and high-dimensional statistics. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science (not explicitly stated, but implied by tenure and awards). Research interests include computational complexity of Nash equilibria, multi-item auctions, machine learning algorithms, and causal inference. His work bridges game theory, economics, probability, and statistics, with applications in AI and healthcare. Key contributions include resolving long-standing problems in computational game theory and developing efficient methods for statistical hypothesis testing. He has been recognized with the 2018 Nevanlinna Prize, ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, and the Kalai Game Theory Prize. Affiliations: CSAIL, LIDS, ORC, and the Foundations of Data Science Institute. Active in multi-agent learning, bias mitigation in data, and generative models.
Ahmed Eldawy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of California, Riverside. He leads groundbreaking research in databases, big data management, and spatial data processing, with a focus on scalable exploratory analytics through systems like Beast , UCR-Star , Raptor , and Spider . His work spans geospatial data infrastructure, distributed computing, and computational geometry. Research Interests : Databases, big data management, spatial data processing, geospatial analytics, distributed systems, computational geometry. Awards : NSF CAREER award (2021), 10-year Influential Paper Award (ICDE 2025), Best Demo award (SIGSPATIAL 2020). Grants : NSF (IIS-2046236, IIS-1954644, CNS-1924694), USDA (USDA NIFA 2020-69012-31914), UC Office of the President (M21PL3368). Labs & Centers : RAISE@UCR, Data Science Center, Center for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CRIS), Affiliate of Center for Geospatial Sciences and Winston Chung Global Energy Center. His recent publications focus on LLM-driven geospatial visualization (LASEK), distributed raster analytics (RDPro), learned spatial query optimization, and scalable spatiotemporal systems. He advises numerous PhD and Master’s students, many of whom now work at top tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta.
Hadi Esmaeilzadeh is an Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering . He previously served as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech (2013-2017) and holds the Halicioğlu Chair in Computer Architecture . As founder/director of the Alternative Computing Technologies (ACT) Laboratory and associate director of UCSD's Center for Machine Integrated Computing and Security (MICS) , his research drives cross-stack solutions for next-generation computer systems. Early tenure recipient at UCSD Coined the term "dark silicon" in computer architecture Developed Tabla/DnnWeaver open-source frameworks Research Interests span: Approximate Computing Neural Acceleration FPGA/ASIC Hardware Design Machine Learning Systems Dark Silicon Challenges Security/Privacy in Accelerated Systems Scientific Recognition : 4 CACM Research Highlights 4 IEEE Micro Top Picks Distinguished Paper Award (HPCA 2016) Inducted to ISCA Hall of Fame (2018) Teaching : Developed courses on accelerator design (CSE 240D) and alternative computing (CS 8803 ACT) Advocates for hands-on FPGA-based learning in Processor Design with FPGAs courses
Zhijian Liu is a Research Scientist at NVIDIA with a PhD from MIT, advised by Song Han. His work focuses on efficient machine learning and systems through sparse computation and hardware-aware neural network design. Rising Star in Data Science (UChicago/UCSD) Rising Star in ML and Systems (MLCommons) Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship awardee Research highlights include: SPVCNN++ for LiDAR segmentation HAQ framework in Intel OpenVINO TorchSparse framework for 3D CNN efficiency His recent publications explore: Efficient visual language models (NVILA) Contextual sparsity in LLM fine-tuning (SparseLoRA) Training-free acceleration of diffusion LLMs Query-aware visual sparsity mechanisms Contact: zhijian@mit.edu
Padhraic Smyth is a Distinguished Professor and Hasso Plattner Endowed Chair in Artificial Intelligence at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), holding joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science and Department of Statistics. He leads the DataLab research group, focusing on machine learning, AI, and their applications in climate science, healthcare, and education. His research spans probabilistic modeling, deep learning, and human-AI collaboration. Education: PhD in Electrical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology (1988), MSEE (1985), and BEng (1984). Prior to UCI, he worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1988–1996). Research Interests: Machine learning, AI, pattern recognition, Bayesian methods, climate science applications, algorithmic fairness, and human-AI interaction. He has published over 200 papers and co-authored textbooks like Modeling the Internet and the Web . Awards: ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, AAAI Fellow, AAAS Fellow, and ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award recipient. He has held leadership roles in UCI's Center for Machine Learning and Data Science. Key Projects: Human-AI collaboration frameworks, robustness in deep learning, climate modeling using spatio-temporal data, and AI fairness with missing attributes. Collaborates with institutions like NASA and industry partners (e.g., Google, eBay). Labs/Teams: Director of UCI’s Data Science Initiative and HPI Research Center in Machine Learning. Supervises a vibrant PhD program with over 30 alumni in academia and industry.
Alfred O. Hero, III is the John H. Holland Distinguished University Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the R. Jamison and Betty Williams Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently on leave from the University of Michigan as a Program Director in the CISE Directorate at the National Science Foundation. His primary appointment is in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), with secondary appointments in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Statistics. He is also affiliated with the UM Center for Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics (CCMB), the UM Graduate Program in Applied and Interdisciplinary Mathematics (AIM), the UM Applied Physics Program, and the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS), which he co-founded from 2015-2018. Hero's research focuses on data science, developing theory and algorithms for multimodality data collection, fusion, analysis and visualization that use statistical machine learning and distributed optimization. His work has applications in wearable technologies for personalized health and predictive medicine, spatio-temporal networks in biology, climate, and social discourse, anomaly detection, and data analysis for international security. His recent research interests include high dimensional spatio-temporal data analysis, multimodal data integration, statistical signal processing, and machine learning, with particular emphasis on predictive mathematical models for biological and physical sciences, social networks, network security and forensics, and personalized health and disease. His recent publications demonstrate a strong focus on high-dimensional statistical methods, contrastive learning, neural network optimization, change detection in temporal graphs, and applications in microbiome analysis and epidemic modeling. The research spans theoretical foundations in information theory and statistical learning while addressing practical applications across multiple domains. Scientific Awards: IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award (1998) Best Original Paper Award from Journal of Flow Cytometry (2008) Best Magazine Paper Award from IEEE Signal Processing Society (2010) SPIE Best Student Paper Award (2011) IEEE ICASSP Best Student Paper Award (2011) IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award (2014) IEEE Signal Processing Society Society Award (2015) IEEE Fourier Award (2020) University of Michigan Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award (2011) Hero has advised over 60 PhD students and 30 postdocs in areas including modeling, computation, and inference for large scale time varying data in the biosciences. He has received significant research funding from the Department of Energy, Army Research Office, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and National Science Foundation. He has held leadership positions including President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2006-2007), Director of Division IX (Signals and Applications) on the IEEE Board of Directors (2009-2011), and Chair of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the US National Academies (2018-2020).
Daniel Grier is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in the Computer Science and Engineering and Mathematics departments at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). His research focuses on quantum complexity theory , particularly exploring near-term quantum computing paradigms and proving quantum advantage over classical systems. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science, MIT B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics, University of South Carolina Research Interests: Grier’s work bridges theoretical computer science and quantum computing, emphasizing algorithm design, complexity class separations, and foundational questions about quantum supremacy. He studies how low-depth quantum circuits, boson sampling, and other near-term technologies can achieve computational tasks classically deemed intractable. Recent Article Trends: His publications explore efficient quantum state learning (e.g., classical shadows), hardness results for quantum sampling problems (e.g., bipartite Gaussian boson sampling), and circuit lower bounds (e.g., depth-2 QAC circuits). These contributions highlight his focus on rigorously defining quantum computational advantages. Awards: None explicitly listed in the text. Advising & Grants: Advises at least one student, Jackson Morris. His research is supported by grants exploring quantum complexity and algorithm design. Teaches advanced courses on quantum complexity theory, computability, discrete mathematics, and quantum computing fundamentals. Labs/Teams: Maintains an active lab focused on quantum complexity theory, collaborating with colleagues on topics like interactive protocols and shallow quantum circuits.
Virginia Smith is the Leonardo Associate Professor of Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, with a courtesy appointment in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. She leads research addressing critical challenges in machine learning systems, particularly focusing on safety and efficiency. Her research interests span federated and collaborative learning, efficient training methods, data privacy, and AI safety. Recent work has explored topics such as model unlearning, LLM security, and resource-efficient distributed learning systems. She has made significant contributions to understanding how to make machine learning systems more robust, private, and efficient while maintaining performance. Professor Smith's publication record demonstrates a clear progression toward addressing practical challenges in deploying machine learning systems at scale. Her recent work shows strong emphasis on large language model safety, privacy-preserving techniques, and efficient distributed learning approaches. The research spans theoretical foundations to practical implementations, with numerous papers appearing in top-tier venues including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and MLSys. AFOSR Young Investigator Award Sloan Research Fellowship 2023 Samsung AI Researcher of the Year Best Paper Award at ICML 2025 Exploration in AI Workshop Outstanding Paper Award at MLSys 2023 As an educator, Professor Smith mentors numerous PhD students and postdocs while teaching advanced machine learning courses at CMU. She serves as Program Chair for ICML 2025 and co-organizes a semester program on Federated and Collaborative Learning at the Simons Institute. Her research group maintains strong collaborations with industry partners including Amazon, where she has received research awards.
Danqi Chen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science. Their research focuses on advancing large language models (LLMs), with emphasis on model alignment, safety, and long-context reasoning capabilities. Key research areas: LLMs, AI safety, retrieval systems, and model optimization Recent work explores theorem proving, context encoding, and ethical content generation Their 2025 publications highlight innovations in formal verification scaffolding, attention mechanism efficiency, and copyright-aware generation. 2024 studies investigate continual memorization, rule-based chatbot representations, and scientific literature retrieval benchmarks. Current projects demonstrate commitment to improving model robustness, interpretability, and security compliance in multimodal systems.
Michael J. Freedman is the Robert E. Kahn Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and co-founder/CTO of Timescale. He received his Ph.D. from NYU’s Courant Institute and degrees from MIT. Current roles: Professor, Co-founder & CTO Affiliations: Princeton University, SNS Group, CITP Associate Education: Ph.D. (NYU), S.B./M.Eng. (MIT) His research spans distributed systems, networking, and security, with innovations like CoralCDN, DONAR, and Ethane. His work impacts decentralized content delivery, software-defined networking, and privacy-enhancing technologies. His recent publications address scalable fusion algorithms, GPU acceleration for data systems, and distributed GPU resource management. These works intersect with cloud infrastructure, network optimization, and security. Scientific honors include: Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) Sloan Fellowship NSF CAREER Award Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award Test of Time Award (Theory of Crypto Conference) ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award He advises graduate students like Sam Ginzburg and Ashwini Raina, who joined Meta AI and Timescale post-PhD. His projects have secured substantial grants, including $110M Series C funding for Timescale. Key labs/teams: Princeton SNS Group Co-founder, Timescale (enterprise data platform) Co-founder, iobeam (IoT analytics, acquired by Timescale) Collaboration with FCC on Consumer Broadband Test Contributions to OpenFlow/SDN standardization
