People

Co-Chairs

  • Bistra Dilkina, USC: Bistra Dilkina is a Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and an Associate Director of the USC Center for AI in Society (CAIS), since January 2018. Before that, Dilkina was as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech. She received her PhD from Cornell, and was a postdoctoral associate at the Institute for Computational Sustainability. Her work spans discrete optimization, machine learning, network design, and stochastic optimization with a focus on problems in sustainability such as wildlife conservation as well as urban and disaster planning.
  • Tanya Berger-Wolf, UIC: Dr. Tanya Berger-Wolf is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she heads the Computational Population Biology Lab, and a co-founder of Wildbook.org, an AI for conservation project of WildMe.org, which she directs. She is a computational ecologist, whose research is at the unique intersection of computer science, wildlife biology, and social sciences.
  • Lucas Joppa, Microsoft AI for Earth: Lucas Joppa is Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Scientist, where he serves as the company’s focal point at the intersection of science, technology, and environmental sustainability. A key component of his role at Microsoft includes leading the AI for Earth program, a significant investment in deploying Microsoft’s AI technologies for environmental solutions in the areas of climate, water, agriculture, and biodiversity conservation.
  • Sunandan Chakraborty, IU: Sunandan Chakraborty is an Assistant Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing, Indiana University IUPUI. He received his PhD from New York University and was a Moore-Sloan postdoctoral researcher at the NYU Center for Data Science. His research focuses on data science for social good, where he builds machine learning and text mining models to a broad spectrum of problems in social and environmental science, agriculture, and health. As a postdoc, he was part of the project “Enforcement Gap Interface”, which was the grand prize winner of the USAID Wildlife Crime Tech Challenge.

Review Committee

  • Gabriel Miller, San Diego Zoo Global
  • Sreejith Menon, Bloomberg LP
  • Sara Beery, Caltech
  • Dave Thau, WWF
  • Jason, Parham, Rensselaer Polytechnic Insitute
  • David Roberts, University of Kent
  • Daniel Sheldon, University of Massachusetts
  • Amrita Gupta, Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Enrico Di Minin, University of Helsinki
  • Yexiang Xue, Purdue University
  • Weitian Tong, Eastern Michigan University
  • Stephanie O'Donnell, WILDLABS
  • Elizabeth Bondi, University of Southern California
  • Aaron Ferber, University of Southern California