Andrew Stephen is the L’Oréal Professor of Marketing and Deputy Dean for Faculty and Research at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. He leads the Marketing faculty and directs the Oxford Future of Marketing Initiative, focusing on emerging technologies like AI and data-driven strategies in marketing, media, and advertising. His research explores digital marketing, consumer behavior, and the impact of new technologies, earning him recognition as a top global marketing scholar. His academic contributions span leading journals such as the Journal of Consumer Research and Harvard Business Review. He serves as editor of the Journal of Consumer Research, co-editor of the International Journal of Research in Marketing, and actively engages with industry through councils like the Mobile Marketing Association’s Brand Safety Council. Teaching responsibilities include marketing curriculum oversight and courses across MBA, Executive MBA, and DPhil programs, focusing on digital transformation, marketing analytics, and the future of marketing. His work bridges academic rigor with industry relevance, addressing challenges in tech-enabled marketing and global brand strategies. Awards: Top marketing academic in the UK (AMA), featured in Poets & Quants’ top 40 under 40, multiple research excellence awards. Labs/Initiatives: Oxford Future of Marketing Initiative, fostering collaborations with leading companies to tackle industry challenges. Grants/Advising: Extensive industry partnerships and academic grants not explicitly detailed in the text.
Derek W Hoiem is a Professor in the Siebel School for Computing and Data Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he has been a faculty member since 2009. His research focuses on computer vision and related areas, and he is also the co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Reconstruct, an AI-based construction technology company. His educational background includes: PhD in Robotics, Carnegie Mellon University (2007) Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship (2008) Prof. Hoiem's research spans computer vision, with a focus on object recognition, scene understanding, and graphics. His work also extends to mobile robotics and 3D scene reconstruction. He has made significant contributions in areas such as visual recognition, 3D modeling, and the application of computer vision in construction monitoring. His recent publications (2023-2025) demonstrate a strong focus on advancing multimodal understanding, particularly in region-based representations, 3D vision, and neural radiance fields. There is a clear trend towards integrating language and vision, improving efficiency in neural networks, and applying computer vision to real-world problems such as construction progress monitoring. His scientific awards and honors are extensive and include: IEEE Fellow (2022) University Scholar (2022) Koendrink Prize (2022) Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, Associate Professor (2021) Campus Distinguished Promotion Award (2015) Best Paper Award: IEEE Winter Conference on Applications in Computer Vision (WACV) (2015) CW Gear Junior Faculty Award (2014) IEEE PAMI Young Researcher Award (2014) Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, Assistant Professor (2014) Sloan Research Fellowship (2013) Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Program Award (2012) NSF CAREER Award (2011) ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention (2008) Carnegie Mellon University SCS Distinguished Dissertation Award (2008) Best Paper Award: IEEE Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) (2006) Prof. Hoiem has secured significant research funding, including an NSF CAREER award and an Intel Early Career Faculty award. He is also actively involved in technology transfer, having co-founded Reconstruct where he serves as Chief Science Officer. His teaching excellence is reflected in multiple "List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent" awards spanning from 2010 to 2021. Prof. Hoiem leads a research group at UIUC focused on computer vision and 3D scene understanding. Additionally, he co-founded and serves as Chief Science Officer at Reconstruct, which develops AI-based solutions for construction monitoring.
Philip S. Yu is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and holds the Wexler Chair in Information Technology. Previously, he led the Software Tools and Techniques department at IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Education: B.S. in Electrical Engineering, National Taiwan University M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, Stanford University M.B.A., New York University His research spans data mining , big data , social networks , privacy-preserving data publishing , graph/network mining , recommender systems , and deep learning . He has authored over 970 papers with 74,500+ citations and an H-index of 127. Recent work focuses on heterogeneous graph representation, quantum walks in network analysis, and federated unlearning. Scientific Honors: ACM SIGKDD 2016 Innovation Award IEEE Computer Society 2013 Technical Achievement Award IEEE ICDM 2003 Research Contributions Award IEEE Region 1 Award (1999) UIC Research of the Year (2013) IBM Master Inventor with 300+ patents AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mentions (2024-2025) He served as Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data and IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering , and on steering committees for ACM KDD and IEEE Data Mining. His work bridges theoretical advances in graph neural networks , deep learning , and privacy-preserving systems with applications in healthcare, social media, and enterprise analytics.
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.
Aishwarya Agrawal is an Assistant Professor at Université de Montréal in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research (DIRO), affiliated with Mila – Quebec Institute of Artificial Intelligence and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. She also serves as a research scientist at Google DeepMind, spending one day weekly there. Education: B.E. in Electrical Engineering (IIT Gandhinagar, 2014), Ph.D. in Computer Science (Georgia Tech, 2019). Her research focuses on multimodal learning , deep learning , natural language processing , and computer vision , particularly in developing AI systems that 'see' and 'communicate' effectively. Grants & Awards: Canada CIFAR AI Chair, 2020 Sigma Xi Best PhD Thesis Award, NVIDIA Fellowship (2018–2019), and multiple fellowships from Google and Facebook. She leads projects like Advancing Multimodal Vision-Language Learning (CRSNG-funded) and StarDoc: Document Structure Extraction (MITACS). Research Contributions: Pioneered benchmarks like CulturalVQA and UI-Vision , and frameworks such as PROGRESS for efficient VLM training. Her work emphasizes cross-modal alignment, robust evaluation, and cultural understanding in AI systems. Labs/Teams: Active in Mila’s core academic group and collaborates with Google DeepMind on multimodal and vision-language research. Supervises a dynamic team of PhD and master’s students in Montreal.
Angjoo Kanazawa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at the University of California, Berkeley. She leads the Kanazawa AI Research (KAIR) lab under the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) umbrella and serves on the advisory board of Wonder Dynamics. Her research focuses on the intersection of computer vision, computer graphics, and machine learning, with a particular emphasis on 4D reconstruction of dynamic scenes, neural radiance fields (NeRF), and systems that model human-environment interactions from 2D visual data. Education : Ph.D., Computer Science (2017), University of Maryland, College Park BA, Mathematics and Computer Science (2012), New York University (NYU) Her work aims to build systems that can capture, perceive, and understand complex 3D/4D worlds from photographs and videos, enabling applications in scene reconstruction, motion analysis, and generative modeling. She has pioneered techniques for scaling NeRFs across GPUs (NeRF-XL), developing open-source tools like nerfstudio and gsplat. Her recent publications focus on topics like self-occluded avatar recovery (SOAR), decentralized diffusion models, and 4D reconstruction of articulated objects for robotics. Kanazawa's research has been recognized with prestigious awards including the IEEE CS TCPAMI Young Researcher Award (2024) , Sloan Research Fellowship (2023) , and Google Faculty Research Award (2021) . Her lab has trained numerous students who now hold positions at leading institutions and companies like Anthropic, Meta Reality Labs, and Luma AI. Key Scientific Awards : IEEE CS TCPAMI Young Researcher Award (2024) Sloan Research Fellow (2023) Hellman Fellow (2022) Bakar Fellows Spark Award (2022) Google Faculty Research Award (2021) Her KAIR lab collaborates extensively with industry partners and academic institutions, including the Max Planck Institute and Google Research. She has served as an advisor for PhD students and postdocs who now lead teams at UC Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, and Luma AI, while her teaching includes graduate courses like CS 280A (Computer Vision) and CS 294-173 (Learning for 3D Vision).
Prof. Dr. Thomas Brinkhoff is Chair of the Institute Board and Chair of Geoinformatics at Oldenburg University of Applied Sciences. He leads the Institute for Applied Photogrammetry and Geoinformatics (IAPG) and contributes to institutions like the Association for the Promotion of Geoinformatics in Northern Germany (GiN e.V.) and the Oldenburg Research and Development Institute for Computer Science (OFFIS e.V.). Education: Diploma in Computer Science (Informatik), Universität Bremen (1990) Doctorate in Computer Science (Dr. rer. nat.), Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (1994) Brinkhoff's research spans geodatabase systems, spatiotemporal data processing, geosensor analytics, and location-based services. His work addresses Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), web-based geospatial visualization, and mobile data integration, with applications in traffic management and forensic science. Recent projects include ProSaDi (Digital Provenance and Collection Research) and contributions to the Laboratory for optical 3D metrology . He has served on program committees for ACM SIGSPATIAL (2002-2019), AGILE conferences (2010-2025), and editorial boards of journals like GeoInformatica and TGIS. Notable Lectures: 2024: Forensic applications of tachograph data 2023: Geoinformatics in homicide investigations 2022: Spatiotemporal analysis for sustainability projects 2015: Open geodata standards at FOSSGIS 2014: Mobile sensor data processing
Kamalika Chaudhuri is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and also serves as a Director and Research Scientist with the FAIR team at Meta AI. Her research focuses on the foundations of trustworthy machine learning, including robust machine learning, learning with privacy, and out-of-distribution generalization. Dr. Chaudhuri has earned her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2007 with a dissertation on "Learning Mixtures of Distributions." Her academic journey has led her to become a leading researcher in machine learning theory with a particular emphasis on privacy and robustness. Her research interests span machine learning foundations with a strong focus on trustworthy AI . She investigates problems at the intersection of differential privacy , adversarial robustness , and out-of-distribution generalization . Her work addresses critical challenges in developing machine learning systems that maintain privacy while preserving utility, resist adversarial attacks, and generalize effectively beyond training data distributions. She has pioneered approaches in privacy-preserving machine learning, robust learning theory, and methods for detecting and mitigating data memorization in models. An analysis of her recent publications (2024-2025) reveals a strong focus on the intersection of privacy, security, and machine learning. Her work spans differential privacy mechanisms, membership inference attacks, memorization detection, and fairness certification. She has been particularly active in developing methods for privacy-preserving foundation models, with several papers on differentially private computer vision and language models. Her research demonstrates a consistent thread of addressing fundamental challenges in trustworthy AI while developing practical solutions that balance privacy, accuracy, and utility. Best Award at the ICLR 2024 Workshop on Privacy Regulation and Protection in Machine Learning Distinguished Paper Award at IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML), 2024 Dr. Chaudhuri has advised numerous PhD students who have gone on to prominent positions at Google, DeepMind, Microsoft Research, and other leading AI institutions. Her group maintains an active research blog with guest posts from UCSD researchers. She has served in significant leadership roles including General Chair for ICML 2022 and Program Co-Chair for both ICML 2019 and AISTATS 2019, where she pioneered initiatives to improve reproducibility in machine learning research. Her research group at UCSD focuses on trustworthy machine learning, with current projects spanning privacy-preserving AI, robustness against adversarial attacks, and methods for ensuring reliable out-of-distribution generalization. The group collaborates closely with the FAIR team at Meta AI, where Dr. Chaudhuri serves as a Research Scientist.
Jeff Huang is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Computer Science at Brown University. His research focuses on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), with emphases on personalized systems using behavioral data, health informatics, and user interfaces. Huang holds a PhD from the University of Washington and degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His work is funded by NSF, NIH, and ARO, and he has received awards including the NSF CAREER Award and ARO Young Investigator Award. Education: PhD in Information Science, University of Washington (2013) MS in Computer Science, University of Washington (2013) BS and MS in Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2007) Research Interests: His work spans health informatics (e.g., sleep tracking systems like Self-E and SleepCoacher), user interface design, and leveraging behavioral data for personalized systems. Notable projects include WebGazer (webcam eye tracking), filtered.ink (creative illustration tools), and Sochiatrist (mental health analytics). Teaching: He teaches courses on user interfaces, HCI, and research methods, including CSCI 0130/1300 (User Interfaces), CSCI 2300 (HCI Seminar), and CSCI 2000 (Research Methods). Awards: NSF CAREER Award Facebook Fellowship ARO Young Investigator Award Grants & Advising: Huang leads a research group advising over 50 students, many of whom have pursued academic and industry roles. His grants support projects in HCI, health tech, and collaborative systems.
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.
Mohammad Saifur Rahman is the Daniels School Chair in Management and a Professor of Management Information Systems at the Mitch Daniels School of Business, Purdue University. Previously, he was an Associate Professor at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. His academic journey includes significant leadership roles such as co-chairing the Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST) in 2013 and serving as president of the INFORMS eBusiness Society in 2014. Currently, he serves as an associate editor for both Management Science and Information Systems Research (ISR). Ph.D. in Management Information Systems, Krannert School of Management, Purdue University (2008) MBA in Management Information Systems, Southern Illinois University (2004) BS in Computer Science, Southern Illinois University (2002) Rahman's research primarily focuses on the economic implications of digital transformations. His work examines how digitization affects consumer behavior, market structures, and business strategies across various industries. He investigates the value of digital traces in driving consumer behavior and improving decision-making, particularly in omnichannel retail environments. His research on the sharing economy has revealed important insights about economic disparities, showing how platforms like Airbnb provide economic benefits to predominantly white neighborhoods while failing to generate similar spillover effects in predominantly Black or Hispanic neighborhoods. His recent publications reveal a consistent focus on the intersection of technology, economics, and social impact. Rahman's work frequently examines how local market structures interact with digital platforms to create or exacerbate economic inequalities. His research spans multiple disciplines including information systems, economics, marketing, and operations management, with a particular emphasis on empirical studies using real-world data from major companies like Walmart and Cisco. CICP Faculty Commercialization Award (2020) INFORMS Sandy Slaughter Early Career Award (2018) World's Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40 by Poets and Quants (2017) Jay N. Ross Young Faculty Scholar Award (2015) Dean's Award for Outstanding Research Achievement (University of Calgary, 2014) Rahman has secured substantial research funding from organizations including Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Adobe Systems ($50,000 grants in 2017 and 2020), Trask Innovation Fund ($21,218), and NSF I-Corps ($50,000). He has advised numerous PhD students and collaborated with industry partners to translate research into practical applications. Rahman co-founded RightFit Analytics, a precision health analytics solution that utilizes AI to learn success patterns in healthcare. He has organized significant academic events including the Krannert-Walmart Data Dive (believed to be the first data dive on a college campus) and the Dawn or Doom Data Dive in cooperation with Cisco. Rahman actively engages with industry through consulting and collaborative research projects. His work with Walmart, Cisco, and other major corporations demonstrates his ability to bridge academic research with practical business applications. He has been particularly active in studying how AI and big data analytics can be leveraged to improve business decision-making while addressing potential negative consequences like algorithmic bias and economic inequality.
Ian Goldberg is a Professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science , University of Waterloo, Canada. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies and leads the Cryptography, Security, and Privacy (CrySP) group . He is affiliated with the Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute and the Institute for Quantum Computing . Research Focus: Security, privacy, and privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) for the Internet, including Off-the-Record (OTR) Messaging , censorship resistance , private information retrieval , and zero-knowledge proofs . Recent Publications: His work addresses metadata protection , deniable authentication , and secure multi-party computation , with applications to anonymous communication and censorship resistance. Scientific Awards: Canada Research Chair in Privacy Enhancing Technologies Students: He advises current and former PhD/Master’s students in projects like Lox , PRSONA , Walkie-Talkie , and SkypeMorph . Notable advisees include Sajin Sasy (Privacy-Preserving Communications), Justin Tracey (PETs Development), and Tao Wang (Website Fingerprinting Defenses). Labs & Teams: Goldberg is a core member of the CrySP group and contributes to the Tor Project and Off-the-Record Messaging open-source initiatives. His research bridges theoretical and applied cryptography, with deployments in real-world systems like Tor and PIR protocols.
Christoph Koch is a Full Professor in the School of Computer and Communication Sciences at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) , Switzerland. He has held academic positions at Cornell University (2007-2010, 2006), Saarland University (2005-2007), and TU Vienna (2001-2005). His research focuses on database systems, logic, programming languages, and data management.
Jianguo Wang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University, joining in Spring 2021. His research focuses on database systems for the cloud and large language models, including disaggregated databases and vector databases. He holds a PhD from the University of California, San Diego, and has worked at Zilliz (Milvus) and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Education: PhD in Computer Science (UC San Diego, 2019), MPhil (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), BSc (Zhengzhou University) Research interests include Disaggregated Databases, Vector Databases for Large Language Models, and cloud-native systems. Notable work includes OpenAurora (an open-source Amazon Aurora prototype) and contributions to Milvus. He has received grants like the NSF CAREER Award and honors such as the IEEE TCDE Rising Star Award. Advising a team of students in database systems and teaching courses like CS592 (Disaggregated Database Systems) and CS440 (Large-scale Data Analytics). Serves on program committees for SIGMOD, VLDB, and ICDE.
Lexing Xie is a Professor in Computer Science at the Australian National University. He leads the ANU Computational Media Lab ( http://cm.cecs.anu.edu.au ) and the ANU Integrated AI Network. His work focuses on the intersection of machine learning, social media analysis, and multimedia understanding. Dr. Xie's research broadly focuses on innovative design and use of machine learning algorithms, especially on large-scale graph data and collective behaviour. His recent work spans several key areas: Popularity in social media -- understanding, predicting, and optimization Multimedia knowledge graphs, vision and language integration Humanising machine intelligence through better understanding of social dynamics His publications reveal a strong trend toward understanding information diffusion patterns in social media, particularly through visual content. He has made significant contributions to the study of visual memes, popularity prediction using point processes, and multimodal learning that connects vision with language. His work often bridges theoretical machine learning with practical applications in social media analysis. Dr. Xie has received recognition for his research, including an Honourable Mention at CSCW 2019 for his work on attention flow in online video networks. His research has been supported by collaborations with major institutions including IBM Research and Columbia University. As an advisor, Dr. Xie has mentored numerous students who have gone on to contribute significantly to publications in top-tier conferences. His lab, the ANU Computational Media Lab, serves as a hub for interdisciplinary research connecting computer science with social sciences.
