Deanna Needell

Deanna Needell earned her BA in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Nevada, Reno and PhD from UC Davis in Mathematics before working as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. She is currently a full professor of mathematics at UCLA, the Dunn Family Endowed Chair in Data Theory, and the Executive Director for UCLA's Institute for Digital Research and Education. Her work is in applied mathematics and data science, with a focus on large-scale optimization, linear algebraic machine learning, and fairness in machine learning. Much of her work involves community partnerships with data-driven needs such as the California Innocence Project, Homeboy Industries, and lymedisease.org.  She has earned many awards including the Alfred P. Sloan fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, the IMA prize in Applied Mathematics, and is a 2022 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Fellow. She has been a research professor fellow at several top research institutes including the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, SLMath, and Simons Institute in Berkeley. She also has served and serves as associate editor for IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Linear Algebra and its Applications, the SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences, and Transactions in Mathematics and its Applications as well as on the organizing committee for SIAM sessions and the Association for Women in Mathematics. 

Ugo F. Edu

Ugo F. Edu is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of medical anthropology, public health, black feminism, and science, technology, and society studies (STS). Using interdisciplinary approaches, her scholarship focuses on reproductive and sexual health, gender, race, aesthetics, body knowledge, and body modifications. Her book project: The "Family Planned": Racial Aesthetics, Sterilization, and Reproductive Fugitivity in Brazil, traces the influence of an economy of race, aesthetics, and sexuality on reproductive and sterilization practices of women in Brazil. She is working on a play, Securing Ties, which draws heavily on her book project as a means for critical public engagement and an incorporation of the arts in her scholarship. She is an Assistant Professor in the African American Studies Department at UCLA.

Michael Karanicolas 

Michael Karanicolas is the Executive Director of the UCLA Institute for Technology Law & Policy, and an affiliated fellow with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. 

Prior to joining UCLA, he was the Wikimedia Fellow at Yale Law, where he led the Initiative on Intermediaries and Information. Michael has ten years of experience in civil society, working projects connected to freedom of expression, transparency, and digital rights. In this capacity, he led law reform campaigns to promote foundational rights for democracy across the developing world, and he was also involved in a 2020 constitutional challenge in Canada, which struck down that country’s criminal prohibition targeting “fake news”. 

His scholarly research encompasses a number of thematic areas, but generally revolves around the application of human rights standards in an online context, including content moderation, privacy and surveillance, digital contracts, internet governance, open government and the right to information, intellectual property law, and the regulation of political speech. Michael has a B.A. (Hons.) from Queen's University (Dean's List), an LL.B. from the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University (Dean's List), and an LL.M. from the University of Toronto.

Mark S. Handcock

Mark S.  Handcock is Professor of Statistics in the Department of Statistics and Data Science. His research involves methodological development, and is based largely on motivation from questions in the social sciences, social epidemiology and environ metrics.

Recent work focuses on statistical models for social networks, the development of statistical methodology for the collection and analysis of social network data, surveying of hard-to-sample populations, spatial processes and demography. For details, see his web page http://faculty.ucla.edu/handcock.

 Sarah T. Roberts

Dr. Sarah T. Roberts is an Associate Professor in UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies and Gender Studies. She also serves as the Director of Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2). In January of this year, Dr. Roberts was named one of the 100 Most Brilliant Women in AI Ethics. She is an expert in the areas of internet culture, social media, digital labor, and the intersections of media and technology. In her book, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media, she coined the term "commercial content moderation" (CCM) to describe the job paid content moderators do to regulate legal guidelines and standards. It is the first book-length ethnographic study of the work commercial content moderators. 

 Andrea Bertozzi

Dr. Andrea Bertozzi is an applied mathematician with expertise in nonlinear partial differential equations and fluid dynamics. She also works in the areas of geometric methods for image processing, social science modeling, and swarming/cooperative dynamics. Bertozzi completed all her degrees in Mathematics at Princeton. Bertozzi moved to UCLA in 2003 as a Professor of Mathematics. Since 2005 she has served as Director of Applied Mathematics, overseeing the graduate and undergraduate research training programs at UCLA. Bertozzi was appointed Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UCLA in 2018, in addition to her primary position in the Mathematics Department. In May 2018 Bertozzi was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. In July 2019 she was awarded SIAM's Kleinman Prize, which recognizes contributions that bridge the gap between high-level mathematics and engineering problems. The award is based on the quality and impact of mathematics. Bertozzi has served on the editorial boards of fourteen journals and to date she has graduated 48 PhD students and has mentored over 41 postdoctoral scholars.  

Jeff Burke

Dr. Jeff Burke (right) is Professor In-Residence of Theater and Associate Dean, Research and Technology at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television (TFT).  He co-directs the UCLA Center for Research in Engineering, Media and Performance (REMAP), a joint effort of TFT and the Samueli School of Engineering.  From 2007-12, he was area lead for participatory urban sensing at the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, which helped define a new application arena for mobile devices. From 2010-20, he was a co-PI and application team lead for the Named Data Networking project, a multi-campus effort to develop a data-centric future Internet architecture. At UCLA, he recently completed an AR immersive theater production set in the world of Amazon Studios’ The Man in the High Castle, and is working on an AR theater adaptation of the Hugo Award-winning novel The City and The City.