Janne Heikkilä is a Professor at the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Oulu, Finland. With over 30 years of experience in computer vision and machine learning, he leads the Center for Machine Vision and Signal Analysis (CMVS) and has contributed extensively to both theoretical and applied research. Research Interests: 3D computer vision, biomedical image analysis, computational photography, and deep learning. Scientific Leadership: IAPR Fellow, Senior IEEE Member, and former President of the Pattern Recognition Society of Finland. His work spans computer vision, radiotherapy planning, and biomedical imaging, with over 200 publications and 14,000 citations. He has secured funding from prestigious organizations like the Academy of Finland and Business Finland. His recent research focuses on debiasing AI models, 6D object pose estimation, and radiotherapy dose prediction. Scientific Awards: IAPR Fellow Senior Member of IEEE
Gabriella Casalino is an Assistant Professor at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Department of Computer Science, and a key researcher at CILAB - Computational Intelligence Lab. Her work focuses on Computational Intelligence methods for interpretable data analysis, particularly in eHealth, Data Stream Mining, and eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) within medical and educational domains. She has contributed to innovative approaches in smartphone-based health monitoring, fuzzy logic applications, and remote vital sign detection via photoplethysmography. Education : Ph.D. in Computer Science, with advanced training at institutions like Universitat de Girona and Université de Mons. Research Trends : Recent publications highlight applications of evolving granular computing, neuro-fuzzy systems, and explainable AI in hypertension prediction, bipolar disorder monitoring, and educational data analysis. Key subfields include remote health monitoring, medical data streams, and hybrid AI models. Grants : Research funded by AIRC (Italian Cancer Research Foundation), focusing on computational methods for healthcare challenges. Labs & Collaborations : Active in CILAB, collaborating on projects involving mHealth solutions, cardiovascular risk assessment, and intelligent educational systems.
Thomas Ploetz is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. His work focuses on sensor-based human activity recognition, wearable computing, and computational behavior analysis with applications in healthcare, smart homes, and education. He leads interdisciplinary research integrating machine learning, IoT systems, and human-centered design. His research interests include improving activity recognition robustness through synthetic data generation, developing explainable AI for time-series analysis, and advancing healthcare technologies like diabetic foot ulcer monitoring systems. He explores ethical implications of wearable sensing in diverse populations, including underrepresented groups. Key contributions include IMUTube (virtual sensor data generation), ProxiCycle (cyclist safety monitoring), and DISCOVER (smart home activity recognition framework). His work addresses challenges in data scarcity, domain adaptation, and long-term system maintenance in pervasive computing environments. He has been awarded grants such as the GVU/IPaT Research and Engagement Grant (2020), and his research appears in top venues like UbiComp and ISWC. He actively contributes to the wearable computing community through conference organization and editorial work.
Jordan Boyd-Graber is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland's College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He serves as a leading researcher in Natural Language Processing with significant contributions across multiple NLP subfields. His work bridges theoretical advances with practical applications requiring human-AI collaboration. His research interests span Natural Language Processing , Question Answering systems , Human-AI collaboration , Machine Translation , and Topic Modeling . He focuses on developing systems that work effectively with humans rather than replacing them, emphasizing interpretability and user-centered design. His work often involves creating evaluation frameworks that better capture real-world utility rather than just technical metrics. His publication record shows consistent leadership in the field, with numerous papers at top venues including ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL. Recent work (2023-2024) demonstrates strong engagement with LLMs, human evaluation methodologies, and practical applications in health and translation domains. His research often involves student collaborators, indicating active mentorship. ACL Fellow (2021) Program Chair for ACL 2023 Organizer of prompt hacking competition Leader in human-centered NLP evaluation Boyd-Graber has secured substantial funding for his research, particularly in projects involving human-AI collaboration and question answering systems. His work often involves interdisciplinary teams spanning computer science, linguistics, and domain-specific applications. He has mentored numerous graduate students who have gone on to successful careers in academia and industry. He leads research groups focused on developing interpretable NLP systems that work effectively with humans, particularly in high-stakes domains like healthcare and education. His lab frequently develops novel evaluation methodologies that better capture real-world utility rather than just technical metrics.
Dr. Zhenghao Chen is a Lecturer in Data Science at the University of Newcastle, affiliated with the School of Information and Physical Sciences. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Sydney in 2022, following a B.Eng. H1 degree from the same institution in 2017. Prior to his current position, Dr. Chen served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Sydney (2022-2024), a Research Engineer at TikTok (2024), and as a Visiting Research Scientist at Microsoft Research and Disney Research (2022-2023). Dr. Chen's educational background includes: Doctor of Philosophy, University of Sydney (2022) Bachelor of Information Technology (B.Eng. H1), University of Sydney (2017) Dr. Chen's research spans multiple domains within artificial intelligence, with particular expertise in Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning. His work in Generative AI has garnered significant recognition, with applications in both academic and industrial settings. His research interests are reflected in his Fields of Research percentages: Deep Learning (30%), Computer Vision (30%), Natural Language Processing (20%), and Multimodal Analysis and Synthesis (20%). His publications in top-tier venues like CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and journals like IEEE TPAMI demonstrate the breadth and impact of his work. Analysis of Dr. Chen's recent publications (2022-2025) reveals a consistent focus on neural compression techniques, 3D perception, and multimodal AI systems. His work spans medical imaging (CXR bone suppression), video compression, point cloud processing, and neural surface reconstruction. A notable trend is his exploration of efficient AI systems that work well under resource constraints, as evidenced by his involvement in the EMCLR workshop. His research often bridges theoretical advances with practical applications across multiple domains. Dr. Chen has received several prestigious awards: Microsoft Research Asia StarTrack Fellowship (2025) ACM SIGMM Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Multimedia Computing (2024) Australia Government Research Training Program (RTP) Fellowship (2019) Google Australia Prize for Excellence in Computer Science (2017) Dr. Chen is actively involved in the academic community, serving on the Program Committee for major AI conferences including CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, SIGGRAPH, AAAI, and others. He also organizes workshops in Multimedia and ICCV conferences, and serves as a reviewer for prestigious journals. His teaching responsibilities include courses on Intelligent Visual Signal Understanding, Video Intelligence and Compression, Database and Information Management, and Computing Fundamentals at both the University of Sydney and University of Newcastle.
Arnab Nandi is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at The Ohio State University, with a courtesy appointment in Biomedical Informatics. He holds leadership roles including Steering Committee Member for the Human-in-the-Loop Data Analytics (HILDA) Workshop and has served as Workshops co-chair for SIGMOD 2025-26 and Demonstrations co-chair for SIGMOD 2024. His research focuses on bridging human interaction and data infrastructure, spanning database systems, human-in-the-loop data analytics, and next-generation query interfaces. Nandi's work emphasizes interactive data exploration through projects like DICE (Distributed Interactive Cube Exploration), GestureDB (Querying Beyond Keyboards), and Omni (Multimodal Data Exploration). His recent research explores integrating LLMs into database education, augmented reality interfaces for data analytics, and multimodal approaches to video querying. Nandi has received numerous honors including the NSF CAREER Award, Google Faculty Research Award, IEEE TCDE Early Career Award, and the University's Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. He was also named to Columbus Business First's '40 under 40' and became an ACM Distinguished Member in 2024. As an educator, he teaches courses including CSE 3241 (Introduction to Database Systems), CSE 5242 (Advanced Database Systems), and CSE 5251 (Introduction to Software Startups). His educational innovations include DBTutor, which integrates LLMs into database systems education. At Ohio State, Nandi co-founded the OHI/O Program, which fosters tech culture through hackathons, and The STEAM Factory, an interdisciplinary research collaboration network. Prior to academia, he was founder and CEO of Mobikit, a connected vehicles data analytics startup acquired by Azuga Inc. (a Bridgestone company). His research has been supported by the NSF and industry partnerships, with applications spanning precision agriculture (CropFusion), clinical data pipelines (ICARUS), and interactive visualization systems (Perceptvis).
Liqiang Wang is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida (UCF), where he directs the Big Data Lab. Previously, he served as faculty at the University of Wyoming (2006-2015). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stony Brook University (2006) and spent a visiting research period at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center (2012-2013). His research focuses on big data analytics, high-performance computing, parallel systems optimization, and applying deep learning to detect programming errors and enhance model robustness. Education: Ph.D., Computer Science, Stony Brook University (2006); Visiting Researcher, IBM Watson (2012-2013). Research Interests: Improving accuracy and security of big data models, optimizing parallel computing systems (HPC, Cloud, GPUs), program analysis for concurrency errors, and deep learning applications in anomaly detection and adversarial robustness. Notable projects include scalable LSQR algorithms for seismic tomography and the OpenMP Analysis Toolkit (OAT) for concurrency error detection. Key Awards: NSF CAREER Award (2011), Castagne Faculty Fellowship (2013-2015), UCF Mid-Career Refresh Award (2020), and grants including a $50K NSF CIVIC-PG grant (2022) and Google/Meta donations. Advising and Grants: Supervises over 20 Ph.D./M.S. students and has secured grants totaling over $100K. Notable collaborations include seismic tomography with NCAR and cloud computing optimization. Labs/Teams: Director of UCF’s Big Data Lab, collaborating on projects like Parallel LSQR and Anti-Neuron Watermarking.
Prof. Rocco OLIVETO is a Full Professor at the University of Molise, affiliated with the School of Biosciences and Territory. His research spans software engineering, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and healthcare technology. He focuses on empirical studies of developer practices, AI-driven code analysis, vulnerability detection in smart contracts, and human-centric computing. His work also addresses challenges in game development, mobile app optimization, and wearable health monitoring systems. Notable research areas include code readability assessment, machine learning applications in healthcare diagnostics, and the effectiveness of AI tools like GitHub Copilot. He has contributed to projects like QualAI (continuous quality improvement for AI systems) and 2Vita-B (cognitive and physical rehabilitation systems). His empirical studies often bridge academic research with real-world developer workflows, emphasizing practical applicability. Prof. Oliveto's recent work explores topics such as automated gameplay analysis for game debugging, detection of engagement issues in video games, and robust methods for identifying security vulnerabilities. He has also investigated Dockerfile quality, developer frustration metrics, and the ethical implications of AI in administrative document simplification.
Dr. Georgiana Ifrim is an Associate Professor at the School of Computer Science, University College Dublin , where she serves as Director of Graduate Research and Co-Lead of the SFI Centre for Research Training in Machine Learning (ML-Labs). She holds concurrent appointments as an SFI Funded Investigator at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics and VistaMilk SFI Research Centre . Her academic journey includes postdoctoral research at Insight Centre, Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C), and Aarhus University's Bioinformatics Research Centre (BiRC). Education: BSc in Computer Science, University of Bucharest, Romania MSc and PhD in Informatics, Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, Germany Dr. Ifrim specializes in scalable predictive modeling for diverse applications including: Sequence learning (DNA analysis, time series) Real-time prediction for streaming data (news/social media, energy) Interpretable machine learning models Knowledge graph exploitation (WordNet/Yago, Naga) Wearable sensor data analysis (sports science, health monitoring) Energy price forecasting for sustainable systems Her recent publications focus on time series explainability (TSHAP, tsCaptum), multivariate analysis (scalable channel selection), and healthcare applications (fall detection, walking speed estimation). Key contributions include open-source tools like SEQL (sequence learner) and Twitter-Topics (event detection). Scientific Awards: Winner of SNOW@WWW14 Data Challenge As Director of Graduate Research, she oversees advanced academic training while leading funded projects at the intersection of machine learning , real-time analytics , and domain-specific applications in agriculture, healthcare, and digital journalism. Her research group maintains active GitHub repositories with open-source implementations.
Tetsunori Kobayashi is a Professor in the School of Fundamental Science and Engineering at Waseda University, Japan, where he has served since 1997. He is renowned for pioneering research in human–robot interaction, spoken language processing, and multimodal conversational systems, leading to over 230 refereed papers and an h-index of 35 (Google Scholar). Education: 1980 B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering, Waseda University 1982 M.Eng. and 1985 Dr.Eng. from Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Waseda University Research Interests: His work spans intelligent robotics , perceptual information processing , pattern recognition , image and audio processing , and conversational AI . He develops algorithms for real-time dialogue systems, multi-party conversation facilitation robots, and non-autoregressive speech recognition leveraging CTC and pre-trained language models. Recent Publication Trends: Since 2020 his group has advanced non-autoregressive end-to-end ASR (Mask-CTC, Intermpl, BECTRA), noise-robust attention , multi-look-ahead conversational ASR , and neural speaker diarization . They integrate BERT-style pre-training with CTC losses to accelerate inference while maintaining accuracy. Parallel work explores vision-and-language topics such as scene-graph generation, video semantic indexing, and personalized summarization for spoken news delivery. Scientific Awards: IEICE Fellow 2023 – for multi-modal multi-party conversation research IPSJ Fellow 2016 – for pioneering robot conversation studies JST Award for Academic Start-ups 2024 Best Paper Awards from IEICE, IEEE BTAS, ACM SIGGRAPH VRCAI, and several IPSJ workshop prizes Advising & Grants: He has mentored dozens of PhD and Master’s students who now lead in academia and industry. Major funded projects include JST CREST on conversational robotics, NEDO and JST-support for AI-based speech interfaces, and industry collaborations with NHK, OKI, and NEC. Labs & Teams: Kobayashi heads the Perceptual Computing Laboratory at Waseda, conducting interdisciplinary research with domestic and international partners such as MIT, ATR, and NHK Science & Technology Labs.
Gabriele Bavota is an Associate Professor at the Software Institute of Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) in Lugano, Switzerland. He leads the SEART (Software Engineering Advanced Research Team) group and serves as Principal Investigator for the DEVINTA ERC starting grant focused on developer intelligence through mining software artifacts. Dr. Bavota's research spans Software Quality, Empirical Software Engineering, and Mining Software Repositories. His work has evolved from foundational studies on code smells and technical debt to cutting-edge research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and software development. He has made significant contributions to understanding API usage patterns, software quality metrics, and developer behavior through empirical studies of large software repositories. His recent publications reveal a strong focus on AI-assisted software development, with extensive research examining code generation, code summarization, and code review automation using large language models. He has also expanded his research to include quality assurance in game development (detecting game stuttering and low engagement events) and voice user interface testing. His work consistently bridges theoretical insights with practical applications for software developers. ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for API compatibility research (MSR 2019) ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for Hugging Face model documentation study (ICPC 2024) ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Artifact Award for deep learning fault taxonomy (ICSE 2020) As an active member of the software engineering research community, Dr. Bavota serves on program committees for major conferences including ICSE, ASE, FSE, and MSR. He has held leadership roles such as Program Co-Chair for ICSME 2023 and Vision/Reflection Track Co-Chair for ICSE. His SEART research group develops practical tools like the SEART Data Hub that streamline large-scale source code mining and preprocessing for empirical software engineering research.
Dr. Stevan Rudinac is a Researcher at the University of Amsterdam's Faculty of Economics and Business , Section Business Analytics . His work focuses on interactive learning systems and multimodal data analysis, particularly in urban contexts and multimedia modeling. Education: PhD in Multimedia and Information Retrieval from Delft University of Technology (2013). Research Interests: Stevan specializes in multimedia modeling , hypergraph learning , and interactive video search . He develops frameworks for scalable analysis of social networks, urban imagery, and large multimodal datasets, bridging machine learning with practical applications in city planning and financial social media. Recent Trends: His 2024-2025 publications highlight large language model optimization , diffusion model evaluation , and dynamic graph embedding for meme stocks. Collaborative projects include the CASTLE 2024 dataset and Exquisitor , a system for 100 million image exploration. Labs & Teams: He contributes to the Business Analytics group at UvA, collaborating with Prof. Marcel Worring and Dr. Björn Þór Jónsson. He co-organized the UrbanMM'21 workshop and participates in ACM Multimedia and MMM conferences.
Arnab Nandi is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at The Ohio State University. His work bridges human interaction with data infrastructure, focusing on database systems, LLM-augmented analytics, and immersive query interfaces. Education: PhD in Computer Science & Engineering from the University of Michigan Leadership: Co-founder of OHI/O Hackathon Program and STEAM Factory interdisciplinary network Research spans human-in-the-loop data analytics , vibe querying (natural language + gestural interfaces), LLM integration into education, and climate response systems . Key projects include Omni (multimodal exploration), GestureDB , and Icarus (clinical pipelines). Recent publications analyze LLM-driven query stacks (HILDA 2025), video analytics (SIGMOD 2022), and data sunglasses for cognitive limits (HILDA 2025). Awards include NSF CAREER Google Faculty Research Award IEEE TCDE Early Career Award ACM Distinguished Member Advises students in database innovation , with alumni at Amazon, AWS, Roblox, and Meta. Teaches CSE 3241 (Database Systems), CSE 5889 (Software Startups), and CSE 5242 (Advanced Databases).
Engin Erzin is a Professor at Koç University's College of Engineering, leading the KUIS AI Lab and Multimedia, Vision and Graphics Lab . His research focuses on AI-driven human-centric systems, affective computing, and multimodal interaction analysis. He has contributed extensively to robotics, speech processing, and human-robot interaction through over 70 peer-reviewed publications since 2008. Research interests include: Affective computing and emotion recognition from speech/gestures Human-robot interaction and socially engaging agents Speech-driven animation and gesture synthesis Multimodal data fusion for interaction analysis Deep learning applications in robotics and biomedical engineering Recent work emphasizes: Developing adaptive pHRI controllers for manufacturing tasks Creating engagement measurement frameworks for human-machine interfaces Advancing Turkish speech recognition through self-supervised learning Designing multimodal databases for interaction studies Labs: KUIS AI Lab : Focuses on AI applications in robotics and human-computer interaction Multimedia Lab : Specializes in vision, graphics, and audiovisual analysis
Hao-Wen Dong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Performing Arts Technology at the University of Michigan, with an affiliation to the Computer Science and Engineering Department. His research focuses on Human-Centered Generative AI for content creation, emphasizing music, audio, and video domains. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCSD, advised by Julian McAuley and Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick. Affiliations: University of Michigan (Primary), UCSD (Ph.D.), National Taiwan University (B.S.) Research Pillars: Generative AI models for new domains, AI-assisted creative tools, and multimodal content creation His work spans music generation (e.g., MuseGAN), audio synthesis (e.g., ViolinDiff), and multimodal systems (e.g., TeaserGen). He has led over 25+ publications in top venues like ISMIR, ICASSP, and ICLR. He advises students in interdisciplinary projects and teaches courses on AI Music and Generative AI for Music/Audio Creation. Notable awards include the Doctoral Award for Excellence in Research (2024) and Rising Stars in AI (2024).
