Andrew Connor is a Senior Lecturer in Archaeology and Ancient History at Monash University. He specializes in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, papyrology, and the social and religious history of ancient Egyptian communities. His research focuses on Egyptian temples during the Roman period, ancient economic practices, and the editing and publication of documentary papyri. Connor has particular expertise in the Fayum depression and Dakhleh Oasis regions. Connor's publications demonstrate a consistent focus on Egyptian religious institutions, economic systems, and textual evidence from archaeological sites. His recent work includes publications on temple administration, Greek papyri, and digital archaeology. He has received multiple teaching awards including the Faculty Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning (2017), Faculty Citation for Overseas Programs (2018), and Vice Chancellor's Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning (2018). Connor teaches courses on Greek and Roman history, archaeology, and ancient languages at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. He serves as Honours Coordinator for the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies.
Bernard (Ben) Arps is Professor of Indonesian and Javanese Language and Culture at Leiden University's Institute for Area Studies within the Faculty of Humanities. His research focuses on the interface of humanities and humanistic social sciences, particularly examining how language, performance, texts, and media contribute to 'worldmaking' - the processes through which people and institutions shape realities for themselves and others. Geographically centered on Southeast Asia with a core focus on Indonesia and the Malay world, Arps specializes in Java and its diasporas. His scholarly interests include religious encounters (particularly between Islam and local vernacular traditions), philological theory as applied to performance and new media, narrativity in song and audio media, and the theoretical foundations of area studies. Arps has conducted extensive fieldwork in Indonesia since 1979, totaling over four years, primarily in Central and Eastern Java regions including Surakarta, Yogyakarta, Banyuwangi, and Cilacap. His current book projects explore the Quest narrative pattern across religious traditions (focusing on Dewa Ruci), the sociopolitical formation of languages through media and performance (using Osing in Banyuwangi as a case study), and the Asian Muslim epic of Amir Hamza. Arps teaches primarily in Leiden's BA programme in South and Southeast Asian Studies, BA in International Studies, and MA programme in Asian Studies. Former chair of the Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania (1995, 1999/2000, 2003-2006, 2008) Previously taught at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London (1988-1993) Held visiting positions at NIAS (2001/02), ANU (2005), University of Michigan (2006/07), NUS/ARI (2011/12), UNS (2017), and IIAS (2018/19) Arps has supervised doctoral, Master's, and Bachelor's dissertations across Indonesian, Malay, Singapore, Cambodian, and Thai studies, with particular expertise in Javanese, Sundanese, Betawi, Balinese, Sasak, Mentawai, and Minangkabau cultures and languages. His work spans religion, performance, media, literature, sociolinguistics, lexicography, and education.
Subhransu Maji is an Associate Professor in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the co-director of the Computer Vision Lab. He is also affiliated with the Center for Data Science and holds a part-time role as an Amazon Scholar. His research focuses on high-level visual recognition algorithms and interdisciplinary applications in ecology and astronomy. He has received prestigious awards including the NSF CAREER Award (2018), Best Paper at WACV 2015, and the Google Graduate Fellowship (2008). Education: PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley (2011), BTech from IIT Kanpur (2006). Prior roles include Research Assistant Professor at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (2012-2014). Research Interests: Computer Vision Machine Learning AI Applications in Ecology and Astronomy 3D Shape Understanding Climate Science Grants and Funding: Supported by NSF, NASA, Climate Change AI, and industry grants from Facebook, NVIDIA, Adobe, and Dolby. Current projects include satellite imagery analysis for ecology and material science applications using deep learning. Labs and Teams: Leads the Computer Vision Lab, collaborates with interdisciplinary teams on ecological monitoring (e.g., bird migration tracking via radar data) and material property prediction (e.g., zeolite adsorption modeling).
Alexei A. Efros is the Howard Friesen Professor in the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and a core member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab. Previously, he spent a decade at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. His research focuses on data-driven computer vision, self-supervised learning, computational photography, and generative models. He has pioneered advancements in visual representation learning, including seminal work on neural radiance fields and generative adversarial networks. Education Background: Efros holds a PhD in Computer Science from MIT, though specific details of his academic journey are not explicitly provided in the text. His career includes postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford with Andrew Zisserman and collaborative work with Team WILLOW at INRIA Paris. Research Interests: Efros explores how vast uncurated visual data can be leveraged for understanding and synthesizing the visual world. Key areas include self-supervised learning, generative models, and applications in robotics and art. His lab has contributed influential techniques such as Style Transfer, GAN-based image synthesis, and neural scene representation learning. Recent work emphasizes real-time adaptation (Test-Time Training), 3D perception models, and ethical AI implications of generative systems. Publications: Over 150+ publications span topics like Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), unsupervised learning, and visual-linguistic models. Notable works include Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation (CUT/GAU), Style Transfer , and Swapping Autoencoder . His research has significant industry impact, with techniques adopted in Adobe’s software and generative AI applications. Grants & Collaborations: Efros has secured major funding from NSF, DARPA, and industry partnerships (e.g., Adobe, NVIDIA). He co-leads projects on scalable vision models, ethical AI, and real-world perception systems. Current collaborations include work with MIT, NYU, and INRIA Paris. Labs & Teams: Leads the BAIR Vision Group at Berkeley, fostering interdisciplinary research between computer vision, graphics, and robotics. The group emphasizes Slow Science principles, prioritizing deep exploration over rapid publication.
Andreas Vlachos is a Professor of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning at the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, and holds the Dinesh Dhamija Fellowship at Fitzwilliam College. His research spans dialogue modeling, automated fact-checking, imitation learning, semantic parsing, biomedical text mining, and trustworthiness in AI systems. PhD in Computer Science, University of Cambridge (supervised by Ted Briscoe and Zoubin Ghahramani) Lecturer at University of Sheffield Postdoctoral roles at UCL, University of Cambridge (NLIP group, Stephen Clark), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (Mark Craven) Current research focuses on evaluating and mitigating biases in language models, advancing fact-checking methodologies, and improving model robustness through interpolation, reinforcement learning, and causal reasoning. His work integrates natural logic, knowledge graphs, and multimodal evidence for verification tasks. Recent publications address uncertainty quantification, temporal planning benchmarks, and ethical framing of NLP artifacts. Grants from ERC, EPSRC, Facebook, Google, and the Alan Turing Institute fund his research team. Collaborations include Sebastian Riedel, Stephen Clark, and Mark Craven. Key projects explore disinformation detection, long-form generation, and confidence calibration in AI systems.
Zaid Harchaoui is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Washington. His research focuses on machine learning, generative AI, and algorithmic optimization, with applications spanning ecology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. He explores learning under distributional shifts and develops tools for scalable generative models in language and vision domains. University: University of Washington Department: Statistics Research Focus: Learning from data with computational, inferential, and mathematical rigor; distributional shift adaptation; generative model scaling Email: zaid@uw.edu His recent work emphasizes generative AI applications in ecology and neuroscience, stochastic optimization for robustness, and algorithmic efficiency in large-scale learning. Key contributions include techniques for distributionally robust optimization, interpretable authorship obfuscation, and uncertainty quantification in behavior classification. Scientific awards and honors are not explicitly mentioned in the provided text. Collaborative efforts often intersect with nonlinear control algorithms, spectral analysis, and privacy-preserving machine learning frameworks.
Almut Sophia Koepke is a junior research group leader at the Technical University of Munich and University of Tübingen, focusing on multimodal learning problems integrating sound, vision, and text. Her work bridges foundational research in audio-visual understanding with practical applications in few-shot learning, zero-shot translation, and cross-modal attention mechanisms.
Rana Hanocka is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, leading the 3DL research group focused on AI-driven 3D geometry processing. She earned her Ph.D. in 2021 from Tel Aviv University under Professors Daniel Cohen-Or and Raja Giryes. Her work explores neural networks for unstructured 3D data, including mesh convolutional networks and self-priors for shape reconstruction. Key research areas include geometric deep learning, human-AI collaboration in 3D modeling, and interpretable neural networks. Notable contributions include MeshCNN (SIGGRAPH 2019) and Point2Mesh (NeurIPS 2020), advancing mesh analysis and point cloud processing. Awards include the 2023 Pazy Research Award and 2020 Rising Star in EECS. Education : Ph.D. Computer Science, Tel Aviv University (2021) Labs/Groups : 3DL Group at UChicago Grants : NSF Grant for AI-driven 3D modeling tools (2023) Research directions emphasize creative human-AI partnerships, unsupervised learning from shape collections, and explainable 3D neural networks. Ongoing projects include style-aware 3D synthesis, interactive segmentation, and multimodal shape interfaces.
Mohsen Goudarzi is an Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), part of Harvard University. He joined the faculty in 2021 after teaching at the University of Minnesota. His academic background includes a PhD from Harvard University and an MA from Stanford University. His research focuses on the Qur’an and early Islamic history, employing literary, linguistic, comparative, and historical approaches. Key interests include the Qur’an’s role in Late Antique religious developments, Islamic exegetical traditions (tafsīr), and theological frameworks (kalām). His current projects explore the Qur’anic worldview’s interpretation and the significance of Meccan cultic rituals to early Islamic identity. He has received teaching excellence awards, including a certificate from the University of Minnesota’s Center for Educational Innovation and three teaching distinctions from Harvard’s Office of Undergraduate Education. Research outputs include groundbreaking articles on Qur’anic exegesis, cultic practices, and interreligious dynamics. Notable works analyze the Qur’an’s engagement with Abrahamic traditions, ritual practices in Mecca, and the textual history of early Islamic manuscripts. His collaborative work on the Ṣan‘ā’1 codex redefined understandings of early Qur’anic canonization. Teaching spans HDS and Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), covering Islamic studies, Qur’anic studies, and religious history. He advises students in HDS programs and contributes to interdisciplinary initiatives at the intersection of theology, history, and textual criticism.
Kevin D. Ashley is a Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. He is also a senior scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center and an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Pittsburgh. His interdisciplinary work bridges artificial intelligence, legal analytics, and ethical reasoning. JD, Harvard Law School M.A. and PhD, University of Massachusetts BA, Princeton University His research focuses on computational modeling of legal reasoning , AI and ethics , legal text analytics , and case-based reasoning . He has pioneered AI applications for legal decision support, automated argumentation, and bias detection in legal corpora. Recent publications include studies on large language models in legal annotation, argument mining, and empirical legal analysis. His work has been supported by multiple National Science Foundation grants, emphasizing fairness in AI and access to justice. 2022 Codex Prize for Computational Law 2015 University of Massachusetts Outstanding Achievement Award 2002 AAAI Fellow for AI in Law contributions 2000 Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award A former President of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law, Ashley has held visiting roles at the University of Bologna, Stanford CodeX, and IBM Watson Research Center. He co-edits the journal Artificial Intelligence and Law and teaches courses on applied legal analytics.
Matthias Hein is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, University of Tübingen. His research focuses on Machine Learning , Adversarial Robustness , and Out-of-Distribution Detection , with applications in computer vision and medical imaging. He has received notable recognition including the Best Paper Honorable Mention Prize at ICLR 2021 and Outstanding Paper Award at CVPR 2021. His work includes developing benchmarks like RobustBench and Spurious ImageNet , and frameworks such as Sparse-RS and DIG-IN . His recent publications emphasize adversarial robustness across multiple domains (vision, text), counterfactual explanations for classifiers, and improved OOD detection methods . Collaborators include prominent researchers like Francesco Croce, Julian Bitterwolf, and Alexander Meinke. Scientific Awards : Best Paper Honorable Mention (ICLR 2021) CVPR 2021 Outstanding Paper Award Key Research Areas : Adversarial Robustness Vision-Language Models Medical Imaging AI Neural Network Calibration
Eytan Adar is a Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, holding dual appointments in the School of Information and the College of Engineering's Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. His work sits at the intersection of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence, focusing on large-scale systems analysis and novel interface design. Adar's research spans multiple domains including social media analysis (Twitter, Reddit), academic citation networks, meme propagation, information extraction, and political networks. His methodological expertise includes data mining, data visualization, and graph-based network analysis. His work often operates at internet scale, examining language, creativity, social network dynamics, and text production. His recent publications reveal a strong focus on AI-human collaboration, with particular attention to generative AI interfaces, visualization techniques for complex data, and ethical considerations in AI systems. His work shows a consistent pattern of bridging theoretical insights with practical system implementations. Best Paper Award at ProtoAI: Model-Informed Prototyping for AI-Powered Interfaces, IUI'21 Honorable Mention Award at CHI'24 for feminist interaction techniques research Best Paper Award at ICWSM'18 for Wikipedia language edition analysis Best Paper Award at ICML 2016 Workshop for neural language model visualization Best Student Paper at WSDM'09 for web dynamics research Best of CHI at CHI 2008 for web revisitation patterns analysis Adar has advised numerous PhD students who have gone on to prominent positions at organizations including Google, Apple, RAND, Northwestern University, and Stanford. His research is generously supported by the NSF, IARPA, NIH, the Education Department, and major technology companies including Adobe, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. He is also a founder of the International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) and has served as Co-General Chair for WSDM and Co-Program Chair for UIST.
Federico ZANETTIN is a Full Professor in the Department of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on translation studies with particular emphasis on corpus linguistics, graphic narrative translation, and journalistic translation. He maintains an active presence in the academic community through editorial work and research collaborations. Professor ZANETTIN's research interests span multiple areas of translation studies. He is particularly known for his work on corpus linguistics and its applications to translation analysis, with a focus on creating and using linguistic databases. His research on the translation of graphic narratives examines the verbal and visual aspects of translating comics and graphic novels across cultures. Additionally, he investigates journalistic translation , analyzing how information is translated and disseminated across media platforms. His scholarly work demonstrates consistent productivity, with numerous publications that explore the intersection of translation, culture, and media. Professor ZANETTIN's research shows particular strength in analyzing adaptation processes across linguistic, cultural, and modal boundaries, both synchronically and diachronically. Professor ZANETTIN serves on several important editorial boards: Co-editor of inTRAlinea Member of the international advisory board for The Translator Member of the international advisory board for Translang Member of the international advisory board for Entreculturas Member of the publications committee for Transletters. International Journal of Translators and Interpreters Member of the scientific committee for the Book series Interactio He is also frequently called upon as a referee for prestigious research projects, including those funded by The British Academy (UK), MIUR (Ministry of Education, University and Research), Italy, CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), Spain, NRC (National Research Council), Canada, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and SNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation). Professor ZANETTIN teaches courses in English language and translation at both undergraduate and graduate levels, focusing on European, American, and postcolonial languages and literatures. His teaching reflects his research expertise in translation studies and cross-cultural communication.
WANG Ye is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS). He holds a PhD in Information Technology from Tampere University of Technology, Finland, and has been a tenured faculty member at NUS since 2002, following his industry research role at Nokia Research Center. He is the director of the Sound and Music Computing Lab at NUS, leading cutting-edge research in AI-driven music and health technologies. PhD, Information Technology, Tampere University of Technology, Finland (2002) MSc, Telecommunications, Braunschweig University of Technology, Germany (1993) BSc, Telecommunications, South China University of Technology, China (1983) His research is centered on Sound and Music Computing for Human Health and Potential (SMC4HHP) , with a focus on eHealth, eLearning, mobile/wearable computing, and music information retrieval. His work spans AI for stroke rehabilitation, language learning through singing, singing voice synthesis, and automatic music transcription. He has pioneered systems like SLIONS (language learning via karaoke), CocoLyricist (AI co-creation for stroke recovery), and SinTechSVS (expressive singing voice synthesis). The latest articles highlight a strong trend in AI-driven music and health technologies , particularly in controllable lyric generation, singing voice synthesis, automatic pronunciation assessment, and multimodal music transcription. The research increasingly integrates large language models, explainable AI, fairness, and real-world deployment, reflecting a shift from theoretical exploration to practical, human-centered applications in healthcare and education. Dr. Wang has received numerous scientific honors, including: Best Paper Awards at ACM MM, ISMIR, IEEE ISM, and CHI First Prize, Asia Pacific Assistive, Rehabilitative, and Therapeutic Technologies Challenge (2015) Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, NUS School of Computing (2024) Top Paper Award, ACM Multimedia 2022 AI in Medicine Collaborative Grant for CocoLyricist project He has supervised over 11 PhD and 20 MComp students and is currently guiding six PhD candidates. His grants come from MOE, NRF, A*STAR, Nokia, and Smule. He has served as General Chair of ISMIR2017 and TPC Co-Chair of ICOT2017, and is on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and Journal of New Music Research. He has also developed and taught the first course on Sound and Music Computing in Singapore. Dr. Wang leads the Sound and Music Computing Lab (SMC Lab) , a multidisciplinary team exploring the synergy of music computing, AI, mobile technology, and cloud systems for health and education. The lab actively collaborates with medical institutions such as NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Singapore General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, and is currently working on projects in AI-supported language learning, stroke rehabilitation, and intelligent music interfaces.
John B. Whitman is a Professor of Linguistics at Cornell University's College of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on language variation, syntax, historical linguistics, and East Asian languages, particularly Japanese and Korean. He explores typological universals, syntactic variation, and diachronic developments, contributing to debates on configurationality and structural universals. Whitman has published extensively on topics ranging from Japanese historical phonology to comparative syntax across East Asian languages. His work often integrates cross-linguistic analysis with neuroscientific insights, as seen in studies on semantic number processing. He has received grants for projects including language revitalization initiatives and syntactic research, and he teaches courses on Japanese language history and language endangerment. Whitman collaborates with interdisciplinary teams and actively engages in linguistic fieldwork and historical text analysis, maintaining affiliations with the East Asia Program and research labs at Cornell. Research interests include syntactic variation, historical syntax, and the interaction between language structure and diachronic change. His recent work examines the evolution of verbal conjugations in Japanese/Korean and the typological implications of syntactic reanalysis. Whitman's publications also address methodological questions in glossing practices and comparative lexicography, bridging historical linguistics with modern computational analysis. Grants and projects include funding from the New Frontier Grants for collaborative research on language documentation and historical syntax. He advises graduate students in the linguistics program and contributes to Cornell's language revitalization efforts, such as Cayuga language preservation initiatives. Whitman's work frequently intersects with cognitive science, as seen in neuroimaging studies of linguistic structures.
