Wei-Lun (Harry) Chao is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University (OSU), College of Engineering. Promoted to this role in May 2025, he is also an Innovation Scholar and Distinguished Assistant Professor of Engineering Inclusive Excellence. His work spans machine learning, computer vision, and their applications in autonomous driving, healthcare, biology, and natural language processing. Research Focus: Machine learning with imperfect data, interpretable and personalized learning, robust perception for autonomous systems, and visual recognition in real-world scenarios. Awards: 2025 OSU Early Career Distinguished Scholar Award, CVPR Best Student Paper Award (2024), CSE Faculty Teaching Award (2024), Lumley Research Award (2023). Grants: Funded by NSF, NIH, ONR, Cisco, AWS, and Google. Notable Research Trends: The 15 most recent articles highlight his work on vision foundation models, federated learning, diffusion models for biological species generation, interpretable vision transformers, and robust perception systems for autonomous driving. Key subfields include sparse autoencoders, 3D object detection, semi-supervised learning, and anomaly detection in scientific domains. Scientific Awards: 2025 Early Career Distinguished Scholar Award (OSU) CVPR Best Student Paper Award (2024) CSE Faculty Teaching Award (2024) Lumley Research Award (2023) Mentoring & Grants: As an advisor for the OSU Buckeye AutoDrive Team and AI Club, he mentors graduate and undergraduate students. His research is supported by major grants from NSF, NIH, ONR, and industry partners like Cisco and Google.
Mathieu Salzmann is a Senior Scientist and Lecturer at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), affiliated with the Computer Vision Laboratory (CVLAB) in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC). He also holds a courtesy appointment with the EPFL College of Humanities and serves as Deputy Chief Data Scientist at the Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC). He has held concurrent roles in teaching units including SIN, SODH, and SSC, reflecting his interdisciplinary engagement. His research focuses on the intersection of machine learning and computer vision, particularly in deep learning for 2D and 3D visual scene understanding, efficient and robust models, domain adaptation, and interpretable AI. These interests are evident across his extensive publication record in top-tier venues. His recent publications (2023–2024) show a consistent trend in advancing deep learning methods for visual recognition, with strong representation at CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICML, ICLR, and NeurIPS. Topics include domain generalization, 3D understanding, model robustness, and multimodal learning, often with applications in real-world systems. His editorial roles as Associate Editor for IEEE TPAMI and Action Editor for TMLR further highlight his leadership in the field. Area Chair: ICML 2023, CVPR 2023, ICCV 2023, NeurIPS 2023, AAAI 2024, ECCV 2024 Associate Editor: IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) Action Editor: Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) Mathieu Salzmann has supervised numerous PhD students at EPFL, both current and past, including Bouquet Yann Yanis, Javed Saqib, Li Shuangqi, and others. He has also been involved in research grants and collaborative projects, such as his work with S. Süsstrunk and R. Baroni on comics reconfiguration. His part-time role as Senior GNC Engineer at ClearSpace (2020–2024) illustrates his applied research engagement in aerospace systems. He is actively involved in EPFL’s data science and AI research ecosystem through SDSC and multiple labs.
Insup Lee is the Cecilia Fitler Moore Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science and Director of the PRECISE Center at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science. He holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering and the Perelman School of Medicine’s Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Informatics. IEEE TCCPS Distinguished Leadership Award (2023) Fellow of the AAAS (2022) Test of Time Award, Runtime Verification (2019) Fellow of the ACM (2017) Best Paper Awards at IEEE ICPS, ACM/IEEE ICCPS, and MEMOCODE His research focuses on cyber-physical systems , real-time and embedded systems , safe autonomy , and internet of medical things , with applications in healthcare and connected systems. He advises PhD students including Eric Lu, Kaustubh Sridhar, Sooyong Jang, and Jean Park (co-advised with Kevin Johnson). Recent publications address safety monitoring for learning-enabled systems, model-free control synthesis using reinforcement learning, and multilingual toxicity guardrails for large language models. His team collaborates with institutions like Hillrom and Penn Nursing to optimize medical device usage in clinical settings.
Trevor Campbell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver. He holds a Ph.D. in Machine Learning and Statistics from MIT and a B.A.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Toronto. His research focuses on automated, scalable Bayesian inference algorithms, Bayesian nonparametrics, and streaming data analysis. Campbell is a core contributor to probabilistic programming tools like Pigeons.jl and has developed influential methods for coreset-based Bayesian inference. Education : Ph.D. in Machine Learning and Statistics (2016), MIT M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics (2013), MIT B.A.Sc. in Aerospace Engineering (2011), University of Toronto Research Interests : His work emphasizes scalable Bayesian computation, including variational inference, MCMC optimization, and coresets. He develops algorithms that balance statistical accuracy with computational efficiency, particularly for large-scale datasets. His recent work explores adaptive samplers (e.g., AutoStep, autoMALA) and theoretical guarantees for coreset methods. Applications span astrophysics, materials science, and network analysis. Awards & Grants : NSERC Discovery Grant (2025) Blackwell-Rosenbluth Award (2021) PIMS Early Career Award (2023) Google Perception Academic Funding (2020) Advising & Labs : He supervises a team of PhD and M.Sc. students at UBC, focusing on Bayesian methodology and computational tools. His lab collaborates with institutions like SFU and MIT on projects involving distributed sampling and probabilistic modeling. He co-organizes workshops on Bayesian computation and serves on editorial boards for Bayesian Analysis and TMLR.
Jonas Fischer is the head of the Explainable Machine Learning group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Department of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. His research focuses on interpreting complex machine learning models, particularly in genomics and healthcare, aiming to enhance robustness and alignment with human decision-making. Prior to his role at MPI, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Department of Biostatistics, where he worked on interpretable models for gene regulatory systems in cancer. Education: PhD in Computer Science from Saarland University (2022), with a thesis titled More than the sum of its parts , exploring the intersection of pattern mining and deep learning. He has contributed to advancing methods in neural network pruning, federated learning, and low-dimensional embeddings (e.g., dtSNE, Mercat). His work bridges computational biology, data mining, and machine learning, with applications in DNA methylation analysis, graph-based differential networks, and biomedical informatics. Key research areas include: (1) Explainable AI and neural network interpretability, (2) Biomedical applications of machine learning (e.g., gene regulatory networks, cancer genomics), (3) Low-dimensional embeddings and visualization techniques, (4) Federated learning for privacy-preserving collaborative models, and (5) Pattern mining for error analysis in NLP and classification tasks. Publications span top venues like NeurIPS, ICLR, Bioinformatics, and Genome Biology. His group develops tools such as BONOBO for omics data integration and node2vec2rank for scalable graph analysis. He actively collaborates with biomedical researchers to address challenges in data-driven healthcare and precision medicine.
Dr Peninah Murage is an Assistant Professor at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in the Department of Public Health, Environments and Society under the Faculty of Public Health and Policy. She specializes in environmental epidemiology with a PhD in Health Geography and focuses on health impacts of environmental changes, particularly climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies. Affiliation: Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health Her research explores climate change effects on health outcomes like heat-related mortality, cardiovascular diseases, and cognitive development in children. She integrates GIS/spatial analysis with public health and policy frameworks to identify nature-based solutions for sustainable development. Current work examines systemic inequalities in heat risk exposure and interventions such as tree-based strategies in low-income settings. Key grants include: Health Protection Research Unit on Climate Change and Health Security (2025-2030, NIHR) Climate Change and Non-Communicable Diseases in Senegal (2024-2027) Pathfinder 2: Accelerating Climate Action for Health (2023-2026) She actively contributes to the Lancet Pathfinder Commission and serves on the Executive Committee of the International Society of Environmental Epidemiology (African Chapter).
Han Liu is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering. He directs the MAGICS (Modern Artificial General Intelligible and Computer Systems) Lab and the Center for Foundation Models and Generative AI at Northwestern, with prior roles as director of the Deep Reinforcement Learning Center at Tencent AI Lab and professor at Princeton and Johns Hopkins Universities. PhD in Machine Learning and Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University (2012), advised by John Lafferty and Larry Wasserman Han Liu's research focuses on integrating artificial intelligence with computer systems, particularly through foundation models and probabilistic graphical models. His work aims to revolutionize science, engineering, and business by deploying statistical machine learning methods in edge and cloud computing environments. Recent research trends include transformer-based models, modern Hopfield networks, genomic foundation models, and theoretical analysis of attention mechanisms. His 2025 publications explore topics like species differentiation with DNA embeddings, universal approximation capabilities of transformers, and metaverse spatial reasoning. Alfred P Sloan Fellowship in Mathematics IMS Tweedie New Researcher Award ASA Noether Young Scholar Award NSF CAREER Award Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers Han Liu serves as associate editor for the Journal of American Statistical Association, Electronic Journal of Statistics, Technometrics, and the Journal of Portfolio Management. He has directed research centers at Northwestern and contributed to major conferences as area chair (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR).
Ariel Pakes is the Thomas Professor of Economics at Harvard University, part of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Economics. He previously held the Charles and Dorothea Dilley Professorship at Yale University and tenured roles at institutions including the University of Wisconsin and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on industrial organization (I.O.), the economics of technological change, and econometric theory. Pakes has advised notable students who now lead economics departments globally and has received prestigious awards including the Frisch Medal (1986) and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002). Education: Pakes earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University in 1980. His academic journey includes roles as a lecturer at Harvard and positions at the University of Jerusalem. Research Interests: Pakes has pioneered methodologies for analyzing I.O. models, including demand and cost system estimation. Recent work examines AI’s impact on pricing strategies, antitrust policy implications of market dynamics, and healthcare cost structures. His theoretical contributions include simulation estimators and frameworks for dynamic oligopolies. Awards: Frisch Medal (Econometric Society, 1986) Fellow of the Econometric Society (1988) Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2002) Best Graduate Student Advisor Award (Yale University, 1996) Advisory and Grants: Pakes has served on NSF panels, including the Economics Advisory Panel and Presidential Fellow Advisory Board. His consulting work spans government agencies and large firms. He edited the RAND Journal of Economics and co-chaired the AEA Census Advisory Panel. Labs/Teams: Collaborates with NBER as a Research Associate and contributes to interdisciplinary projects like the PNAS issue on 'Science, Technology and the Economy.'
Michael A Osborne is Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Oxford and leads the Bayesian Exploration Lab . He serves as Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems and co-directs the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative. His research focuses on Bayesian optimization, Gaussian processes, and probabilistic numerics with applications in quantum devices, battery modeling, and AI governance. Key Positions: Professor of Machine Learning, University of Oxford Official Fellow, Exeter College Co-founder of Mind Foundry Lead Researcher, Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment Research Themes: Probabilistic modeling for quantum systems Uncertainty quantification in energy storage AI safety and societal impact analysis Automated experimental design Quantum device calibration Probabilistic numerical methods Technical Contributions: Bridging reality gap in quantum devices Efficient Bayesian quadrature techniques Personalized neurostimulation algorithms Automated measurement protocols Quantum-classical hybrid ML
Simon King is a Professor of Speech Processing at the University of Edinburgh , affiliated with the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences . He serves as Director of the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) and teaches courses like Speech Processing and Speech Synthesis , while directing the MSc in Speech and Language Processing . Research Interests His research focuses on: Developing new acoustic models (e.g., Linear Dynamical Models, factorial-HMMs) for speech recognition Advancing unit selection and HMM-based speech synthesis Integrating articulatory measurement data for enhanced modeling Exploring perceptual measures in synthesis criteria Building multilingual speech systems to identify universal speech building blocks Publication Trends Simon's recent work emphasizes deep learning (DNNs, LSTMs) in speech synthesis, multilingual frameworks , and articulatory-acoustic feature integration . His studies often bridge grapheme-based modeling , perceptual error reduction , and noise-robust synthesis . Scientific Awards EPSRC Advanced Research Fellowship (2005-2009) Students & Collaborations He has supervised numerous PhD students including Rasmus Dall, Tom Merritt, and Srikanth Ronanki. Current research fellows like Mirjam Wester and Zhizheng Wu contribute to projects such as Natural Speech Technology (NST) and Simple4All .
Nancy Margaret Reid is a University Professor of Statistical Sciences at the University of Toronto, holding the Canada Research Chair in Statistical Theory and Applications. She has served as Scientific Director of the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute (2015–2019) and led the Department of Statistical Sciences as Chair (1997–2002). Her research focuses on theoretical statistics, particularly likelihood inference and foundational aspects of statistical methodology. Reid earned her PhD from Stanford University (1979) under Rupert G. Miller, with Brad Efron and Vernon Johns on her committee. Reid's accolades include Fellowships from the Royal Society, Royal Society of Canada, and National Academy of Sciences, as well as the Guy Medal in Gold (2022) and David R. Cox Award (2023). She has authored influential books like *Theory of the Design of Experiments* and contributed to courses on mathematical statistics and likelihood inference. Active in academic service, she teaches graduate-level courses and has advised numerous students and postdocs in theoretical and applied statistical research.
Caglar Gulcehre is a Tenure Track Assistant Professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Principal Investigator of the CLAIRE (Caglar Gulcehre Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence Research) lab. Previously, he worked as a Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, Microsoft Research, and IBM Research. His research focuses on reinforcement learning , foundation models , LLM alignment , and sequence modeling . Current Position : Assistant Professor, EPFL Lab : CLAIRE Lab Previous Roles : Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind, MSR, IBM Research His work spans reinforcement learning , deep learning , and neural architecture design , with a focus on safety , trustworthy AI , and real-world applications . He has published in top venues including Nature , NeurIPS , ICML , and JMLR . Scientific contributions include: Best paper award at NeurIPS Nonconvex Optimization workshop Honorable mention for best paper at ICML 2019 Co-organizer of seven workshops at NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR He supervises PhD students in areas related to AI for algorithm discovery , neural architectures , and foundation models , including: Skander Moalla Justin Samuel Deschenaux Liangze Jiang Xiuying Wei Yitao Xu
Olga Russakovsky is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University and Associate Director of the Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence. Her research focuses on computer vision , machine learning , human-computer interaction , and fairness, accountability, and transparency in AI systems. Princeton University faculty member since 2025 Affiliated with Princeton's Center for Statistics and Machine Learning and Center for Information Technology Policy Scientific Recognition: Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2025) PAMI Young Researcher Award (2022) AnitaB.org Emerging Leader Abie Award (2020) CRA-WP Anita Borg Early Career Award (2020) MIT Technology Review 35-under-35 Innovator (2017) PAMI Everingham Prize (2016) As a co-founder and current Board Chair of AI4ALL , she drives initiatives to expand diversity in AI. Her recent publications demonstrate expertise in vision-language models , deepfake detection , and ethical AI systems .
Panos Ipeirotis is a Professor at the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University, affiliated with the Department of Technology, Operations, and Statistics. He also serves as the George A. Kellner Faculty Fellow and is associated with the Center for Data Science and Computer Science departments at NYU. PhD in Computer Science (Columbia University, 2004) MSc in Computer Science (Columbia University, 2001) BSc in Computer Engineering & Informatics (University of Patras, 1999) His research spans crowdsourcing, machine learning, human-AI collaboration, online labor markets, and social media analytics. He pioneered human-machine loop systems that combine human and machine intelligence to achieve superior outcomes. His work has applications in data quality assurance, visual media search (e.g., Google Project Glass), and economic valuation of user-generated content. Recent publications focus on algorithmic fairness in hiring systems, occupational segregation analysis, and theoretical advancements in crowdsourcing consensus mechanisms. Earlier work includes foundational studies on data quality in crowdsourcing platforms, economic impacts of product reviews, and query optimization for text-centric tasks. 2015 Lagrange Prize in Complex Systems NSF CAREER Award SIGKDD Test of Time Award (2020) Multiple Best Paper awards (WWW 2011, KDD 2008, SIGMOD 2006) He has received significant grants, including a $1.5 million Google Research Grant (2013) for integrating crowdsourcing with machine learning algorithms. His work bridges computer science, economics, and social psychology, with implications for policy-making and business strategy.
Celestine Mendler-Dünner is a Principal Investigator at the ELLIS Institute in Tübingen, co-affiliated with the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the Tübingen AI Center. She leads the Algorithms and Society research group, focusing on machine learning in social contexts and the role of prediction in digital economies. Her work bridges theoretical machine learning with practical societal impact, developing tools for safe, reliable, and equitable AI ecosystems. Her educational background includes a PhD from ETH Zurich in collaboration with IBM Research, followed by an SNSF postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley hosted by Moritz Hardt. She was previously a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems before joining the ELLIS Institute. Mendler-Dünner's research spans several interconnected themes including performative prediction (where predictions change the behavior they aim to predict), algorithmic collective action (how participants can steer AI systems toward common goals), and the role of LLMs in social science research. Her work combines theoretical foundations with practical implementations, addressing challenges in interactive machine learning, optimization in dynamic environments, and context-specific evaluation of AI systems. She particularly examines how algorithmic predictions mediate services and platforms at societal scale, exploring concepts of economic power in digital markets. Her publication record shows a clear evolution from system-aware machine learning algorithms (including foundational work on IBM Snap ML) toward increasingly sociotechnical questions at the intersection of machine learning, economics, and policy. Recent work focuses on measuring performative power in digital economies, evaluating LLMs as risk scores, and developing frameworks for algorithmic collective action in recommender systems and labor markets. Among her notable recognitions are the ETH Medal for her dissertation, the IBM Research Division Award, the Fritz Kutter Award, and the IBM Eminence and Excellence Award. She is an ELLIS Scholar, a fellow of the Elisabeth-Schiemann-Kolleg, and affiliated with several prestigious research programs including the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems and the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems. ETH Medal (dissertation award) IBM Research Division Award Fritz Kutter Award IBM Eminence and Excellence Award SNSF Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship Mendler-Dünner actively mentors the next generation of researchers, advising PhD student Patrik Wolf and supervising research interns including Joachim Baumann, Haiqing Zhu, and Anna Badalyan, as well as Master's student Dorothee Sigg. She serves as core faculty for the International Max Planck Research School and associated faculty for the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems. Her group has secured significant research funding through fellowships and institutional support, enabling work on projects like Powermeter (measuring search engine influence) and Snap ML (resource-efficient machine learning library with over 1 million PyPI downloads). She leads the Algorithms and Society research group, which examines machine learning as part of broader sociotechnical ecosystems. The group explores human-population interactions with algorithmic systems and incorporates these insights into learning system fundamentals. Current projects include investigating economic incentives in digital platforms, developing tools for systematic LLM evaluation in social science contexts, and creating frameworks for collective action in algorithmic systems. Mendler-Dünner also co-organizes the Algorithmic Collective Action workshop at NeurIPS 2025, demonstrating her leadership in emerging research directions at the AI-society interface.
