Speakers

Marc Ballon

Marc Ballon and Elisabeth Weiss are faculty at the Viterbi Engineering in Society program and will be giving a short overview of EiS and the ATLAS Project, a community engaged learning project at the intersection of engineering and social/environmental disciplines. Marc will be presenting on their behalf.

Keith Burghardt

Keith Burghardt is a Computer Scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute who researches evolving geospatial systems. Burghardt is an editorial board member at Social Network Analysis and Mining and PLOS Complex Systems and his research has won awards including the Runner-Up Best Paper Award at ASONAM 2022 and Best Poster Award at RCC-RD-MCD in 2022. In addition, his work has received news coverage from The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and others. Burghardt received a PhD and BS in Physics at the University of Maryland in 2016 and 2012, respectively

Kayley Butler

Kayley Butler is a Ph.D. student at USC studying Environmental Engineering in Sam J. Silva's research group, with a focus on the intersection of artificial intelligence and atmospheric science. With a background in physics and sustainability, Kayley is passionate about applying machine learning tools to help solve climate problems. Her latest project focused on dimensionality reduction techniques for aerosol-cloud interactions in collaboration with the NASA ACTIVATE Mission.

Kai Chen

Kai Chen is a first-year PhD student at USC and ISI. He is advised by Prof Kristina Lerman. His research interest mainly revolves around natural language processing and computational social science. Specifically, he is interested in model safety and LLM application. Recently, he has been studying ideological manipulation in LLM. He also leverages LLM to understand the influence campaign in online social media

Karishma Chhugani

Karishma Chhugani is pursuing her PhD in Pharmaceutical and Translational Sciences in which she is conducting bioinformatics research with Dr. Serghei Mangul and simultaneously is completing her Master’s in Management of Drug Development at USC Alfred E. Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. She completed her thesis-based Master’s in Pharmaceutical Sciences from here as well in May 2021. She graduated from University of California, Riverside in June 2019 with a Bachelor’s of Science in Cellular, Molecular, and Developmental Biology. Currently, as part of her PhD projects, Karishma is creating a unified repository for robust, rigorous, and reproducible analysis of TCR-Seq data. In another project, she is benchmarking various machine learning algorithms to predict mortality in sepsis patients from gene expression and cell type composition data.

Bistra Dilkina

Bistra Dilkina is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. She is also the co-Director of the USC Center for AI in Society (CAIS), a joint effort between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. During 2013-2017, Dilkina was as an Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a co-director of the Data Science for Social Good Atlanta summer program. She received her PhD from Cornell University in 2012, and was a Post-Doctoral Associate at the Institute for Computational Sustainability until 2013. Dilkina is one of the junior faculty leaders in the young field of Computational Sustainability, and has co-organized workshops, tutorials, special tracks at major conferences on Computational Sustainability and related subareas. Her work spans discrete optimization, network design, stochastic optimization, and machine learning.

Stephen Gibler

Stephen has served in a variety of executive and management positions during his tenure, producing and production for 8 feature films, over a dozen commercials, 5 reality TV shows, 30+ new media advocacy projects, was the Chief Producer of the largest immersive art museum / nightclub in China called 'The Silos', and currently has an AI Tech Media Startup, Logline AI. He has worked with renowned members of the film community, such as James Ivory, Jackie Earle Haley, Haley Joel Osment, and Ridley Scott, and has produced for brands such as Amazon, Lancôme, Head & Shoulders, and beyond.

Aditi Hande

Aditi is interested in machine learning research in the field of natural language processing. She has completed her Engineering in Computer Science from Pune Institute of Computer Technology and is Masters student-CS at USC. She has worked with CAIS as student worker and on various projects with CAIS co-director Dr. Eric Rice.

Parsa Hejabi

Parsa Hejabi is a Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California and a graduate research assistant at the Morality and Language Lab under the supervision of Prof. Morteza Dehghani. He has worked on enhancing NLP models within multiple instance learning environments, developing multimodal annotation platforms for AI in policing, and improving NLP models for under-resourced languages such as Farsi. Previously, Parsa earned an M.S. in Computer Science from USC and a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Shahid Beheshti University. He also has experience working as a software engineer at one of the largest e-commerce companies in the Middle East.

Abigail Horn

Abigail Horn is a Research Assistant Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Research Lead in the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at USC, where she is a Co-Director of the AI4Health Center. She previously conducted postdoctoral fellowship training in Health Behavior and Biostatistics in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences also at USC. She obtained her Ph.D. in Engineering Systems from the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT and an undergraduate degree in Physics from the College of Creative Studies at the UCSB. Before coming to USC she completed a joint research fellowship in transport and logistics modeling at the Kuhne Logistics University (Hamburg) and in epidemiology and bioinformatics at the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment. The general area of her research is the combination of approaches from computational social science, systems modeling, and AI with large-scale data sources to design solutions to pressing public health challenges related to food systems, from food safety to nutrition.

Julie Jiang

Julie is a final-year PhD candidate at USC-ISI. As a computational social scientist, her goal is to utilize AI for online social good. Her work has been published at top conferences such as ICWSM, CSCW, CHI, and WWW. During her PhD, she interned at TikTok Applied ML, Spotify Research, and Snap Research and was also awarded the Snap Research Fellowship in 2022. In recognition of her research contributions to advance social good, she was recently named a 2024 Forbes 30 Under 30 in the science category. She was also one of six recipients of the USC PhD Achievement Award.

Mike Jones

Mike Jones, Director, Web & Automation Technologies, USC Libraries: Mike leads the USC Libraries Web & Automation Technologies team, developing and implementing strategic initiatives around web and artificial intelligence technology. His role includes identifying opportunities and planning solutions to incorporate machine learning and AI into both internal and public facing services and resources at the USC Libraries. Mike has led the development of the USC Interactive Interviews service, Interactive Wonderland Characters, and the USC Libraries current chatbot, among other projects and initiatives

Kristina Lerman

Dr. Kristina Lerman is a Research Professor of Computer Science in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and Principal Scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute. Dr. Lerman received a PhD in Physics from the University of California at Santa Barbara. She applies network science and machine learning to problems in computational social science, including social media analysis, information diffusion in networks, social voting and recommendation, and more recently, dynamics of cognitive performance.

Stephen Lieberman

Stephen Lieberman is a nonprofit leader and research scientist focusing on the application of novel technologies to promote large scale social and economic equity. Steve brings 20 years of experience leading technical and operational teams across nonprofits, government, academia, and industry. Previous roles include organizational management, grant writing, software development, and technology program leadership as a Principal Investigator at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA and as a Senior Manager at Northrop Grumman. He has published and presented extensively on the use of modeling and simulation techniques to forecast human behavior and is currently pursuing a DSW at USC.

Eric Rice

Eric Rice is a professor and the founding co-director of the USC Center for AI in Society, a joint venture of the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Professor Rice received a BA from the University of Chicago, and an MA and PhD in Sociology from Stanford University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles. He joined the USC faculty in 2009. Professor Rice specializes in social network science and theory, as well as community-based research. His primary focus is on youth experiencing homelessness and how issues of social network influence may affect risk-taking behaviors and resilience.

Shaddy Saba

Shaddy Saba is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. He is working to address the behavioral health needs of at-risk populations such as military veterans and young people who have experienced trauma. He studies multi-morbid behavioral health problems (that is, problems that occur together such as PTSD, physical pain, and substance use disorders) using theory-guided and data-driven research methodologies. He hopes by better understanding how multi-morbid conditions develop and impact one another, we can disseminate increasingly effective intervention strategies. He is particularly focused on mindfulness-based and digital mental health interventions.

Ajitesh Srivastava

Dr. Ajitesh Srivastava is a USC Center for AI in Society Associate Director and Research Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Dr. Srivastava earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Southern California in 2018. His research interests include social networks, algorithms, parallel computing, and machine learning applied to social good, crime, smart grids, and computer architecture.

Craig Stubing

Craig Stubing, Digital Media Producer, USC Digital Repository

Craig is a graduate of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and worked as the Multimedia Editor for the USC U.S-China Institute for 12 years. He's the host of the award winning Beta Cell podcast and has founded three nonprofits, Type One Run, Beta Cell Foundation, and Beta Cell Action. At the Digital Repository, he oversees the production of our Interactive Interviews and our video and digital marketing.

Swabha Swayamdipta

Swabha Swayamdipta is the Gabilan Assistant Professor of Computer Science at USC and a USC CAIS associate director. Her research interests are in natural language processing, with a focus on studying data distributions to uncover and address spurious biases and annotation artifacts, towards improving robust generalization. Swabha was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, and received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Masters from Columbia University. Her work has received an outstanding paper award at NeurIPS 2021 and an honorable mention for the best paper at ACL 2020.

Phebe Vayanos

Phebe Vayanos is a USC CAIS co-director and associate professor of industrial & systems engineering and computer science in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. Dr. Vayanos‘ research is focused on Artificial Intelligence and Operations Research and in particular on optimization, machine learning, and game theory. She aims to build foundational knowledge in these areas to enable the design of intelligent systems that can operate reliably in the open world, in complex, uncertain environments, and against strategic adversaries. She designs algorithms that are suitable for use by human decision-makers, that are transparent and interpretable, and that integrate human value judgments. Her research is motivated by problems that are important for social good and aims to craft solutions that are fair and non-discriminatory, and therefore suitable to be deployed in our society. She earned her PhD in Operations Research at the Imperial College in London.

Elisabeth Weiss

Elisabeth Arnold Weiss teaches advanced Writing and Communication for Engineers. She also teaches in the Viterbi Aviation Safety and Security Program and developed the cross-cultural and global community building components of Viterbi’s global innovation course. Elisabeth has formed long-standing outreach partnerships with The Accelerated Schools and AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles and built ATLAS, a community engaged learning project focused on social impact, sustainability, and societal readiness. She is a frequent faculty contributor to Viterbi K-12 STEM Center programs.

Shinyi Wu

Dr. Shinyi Wu, PhD in Industrial Engineering, is a USC Associate Professor with joint appointments in the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work and the Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Viterbi School of Engineering. She has led many funded research projects focused on improving healthcare delivery through technology, data analysis, and process redesign. Her work aids clinicians, patients, and caregivers, particularly those facing chronic illness or belonging to vulnerable populations.

Poster Presenters

Majd Al Aawar

Majd Al Aawar graduated from USC with a M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, track in Machine Learning and Data Science, in 2023. He currently works with Professor Ajitesh Srivastava as a Data scientist on several CDC funded projects. His past and current work include COVID/Influenza scenario modeling and forecasting, Shape-informed ensembles for collaborative forecasting, and predicting transmission of Covid-19 variants between countries via GNN.

Charles Bickham

As a Computer Science Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California, I am passionate about revolutionizing healthcare with AI, focusing on depression, eating disorders, HIV, and cancer. My journey includes internships at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, NASA JPL, Accenture, and Farmers & Merchants Bank, offering practical insights into AI's role in real-world challenges. As a McNair Scholar and a GEM Fellow, I've strengthened my commitment to advancing education and society through AI research. Beyond academic and career goals, my vision is to use AI for positive healthcare and societal transformations, striving for lasting impact.

Jayne Bottarini

Jayne Bottarini is currently an undergraduate student studying Computer Science and Business Administration in the class of Spring 2025. She participates in CAIS++ as one of the Co-Vice Presidents of Curriculum, creating and helping teach a deep learning-based curriculum to other undergraduate students. In artificial intelligence application areas, she is especially drawn to climate-based projects with goals contributing to and improving environmental sustainability with technology.

Keith Burghardt

Emily Chen

Emily Chen is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Southern California and at the USC Information Sciences Institute. She completed her B.S. in Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2017, and received her M.S. in Computer Science at USC in 2021. Her research interests are at the intersection of machine learning, computational social sciences and human behavior analysis in online social networks.

Weizhe Chen

Weizhe Chen is a third-year CS Ph.D. candidate, advised by Prof. Bistra Dilkina and Prof. Sven Koenig. His research focuses on the intersection of machine learning, optimization, and computational sustainability. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Karishma Chhugani

Likhitha Chittampalli

I am a graduate student and I was recently a software engineer with extensive experience in building and scaling various systems. Additionally, I’m currently contributing to Dr. Serghei Mangul’s Bioinformatics lab, where I delve into the fascinating intersection of biology, data science, and computational methods. I have applied my computer science and machine learning skills to solve real-world challenges. I am well-versed in software design patterns and I have leveraged different frameworks and tools to deliver high-quality products.

Eun Cheol Choi

Eun Cheol Choi is a PhD student at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California. He specializes in the intersection of social networks, computational social science, and journalism. His research focuses on devising effective interventions to combat misinformation.

David Chu

My name is David Chu, and I'm a CS Ph.D working at the USC Information Sciences Institute. My research interests lie in the intersection of AI, mental health, and social media. Looking forward to learning new ideas and connecting with you all!

Siddartha Devic

Siddartha Devic is a CS PhD student in the USC Theory Group, where he is fortunate to be advised by the wonderful Vatsal Sharan and Aleksandra Korolova. He is broadly interested in (1) algorithmic fairness, especially in the presence of uncertainty, finite resources, and ranking / two-sided marketplaces; and (2) theoretical machine learning.

Priyanka Dey

Priyanka Dey is a 1st year PhD student in Computer Science at USC in the Humans Lab under Professor Emilio Ferrara. She is particularly interested in understanding changes in human emotions through social media usage and using user's emotion tendencies, personality traits, and behavioral patterns to generate personalized and customized content. Previously, Priyanka completed her Master's and Bachelor's in Computer Science and Statistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign where she is grateful to have been advised by Professor ChengXiang Zhai. Previously, she has worked on fine-grained context classification and emotion detection frameworks.

Wendy Fong

Wendy Fong is a seasoned professional with over 20 years of experience in industrial operations, supply chain management, and alliance building in the medical products industry, focusing on large molecule therapeutics. As the Senior Director of Business Expansion at Grifols, she leads global coordination for innovative bioscience manufacturing solutions to meet customer needs while complying with applicable best practices, standards, and regulatory requirements.

Jessica Fu

Jessica Fu is a rising junior majoring in Computer Science and minoring in Internet of Things Engineering. She is interested in exploring how computer vision and other deep learning techniques can be applied to enhance and assist how people live.

Patrick Gerard

A PhD student working under Kristina Lerman at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. I'm interested in the intersection of machine learning and network science and how they can be utilized to uncover the mechanisms of (mis)information diffusion across media.

Daniel Getter

Daniel Getter is a first year graduate student in Sam Silva’s group in the Earth Sciences department at USC. He graduated with a degree in Applied Mathematics from UC Berkeley in 2020. Since then, he has turned his sights on better understanding the atmosphere, using a variety of statistical, machine learning, and graph-theoretic techniques to investigate the complexities present in Earth’s atmospheric chemical processes.

Aditya Guruprasad

Zihao He

Zihao is a fifth-year PhD candidate in computer science at Department of Computer Science and Information Sciences Insitute of University of Southern California (USC). He is advised by Prof. Kristina Lerman. He is generally interested in natural language processing and computational social science. Specifically, he works on discovering polarization from text using natural language processing, and investigating how large language models will impact the society.

Luc Hosy

Luc Hosy is a designer and innovator based in Southern California, currently studying at USC's Iovine and Young Academy. With a keen focus on developing impactful ideas, Luc aims to merge good design with human psychology and technology. He holds a special interest in affective computing and the creation of ""feeling machines"", seeking to deepen his understanding and bridge gaps in this field

You Qi Huang

Youqi Huang is a second year undergraduate studying computer science at the University of Southern California. She is presenting this poster through Center For AI in Society Undergraduate Branch, CAIS++.

Pratyush Jaishanker

Pratyush Jaishanker is a sophomore studying Computer Science with a minor in Marine Biology. He is an undergraduate researcher at the USC Center for Artificial Intelligence in Society, working under Professor Bistra Dilkina. His academic interests include using computational methods to understand the environment and advance sustainability.

Jaron Kawamura

Jaron Kawamura is a sophomore studying Biomedical Engineering with a minor in Environmental Health. He is an undergraduate research fellow in the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology Irimia Lab, under Professor Andrei Irimia. His interests include health, Blue Zones, the environment, and the intersection of all of the above.

Darius Mahjoob

Darius is a first year undergraduate student pursuing a bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Business Administration with a double minor in Jazz Studies and Applications of Artificial Intelligence. Joining USC's Center for AI in Society (Undergraduate Chapter) in Fall '23, Darius has worked on several AI/ML projects, including a binary classification model to predict sarcasm in newspaper articles and a neural network to analyze anomalous patterns within network traffic as a response to cyber threat scenarios. Outside of CAIS++, Darius is the Director of Professional Development at USC's Avenues Consulting Group and performs with the Student Symphony Orchestra.

Julie Jiang

Joel Anil John

I am currently a 1st year Master of Science, Computer Science student at California State University, Fullerton. I have been involved in Dr. Anand Panangandan and Dr. Kiren George’s research group since the summer of 2024, focusing on building an Android application to connect to IOT devices through Bluetooth Low Energy.

Caroline Johnston

Caroline Johnston is a 5th year PhD student in the Industrial & Systems Engineering department advised by Dr. Phebe Vayanos. Her research focuses on developing preference elicitation tools for public policy using robust optimization, focusing on applications in public health such as the COVID-19 pandemic and homelessness. She is a recipient of the NSF GRFP.

Melody JY Kang

Melody JY Kang is a second year PhD student being co-supervised by Dr. Christopher Ching and Dr. Paul Thompson, at the Imaging Genetics Center, part of University of Southern California. She works in the ENIGMA (Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) Consortium's bipolar disorder working group (ENIGMA-BD), where she studies structural and functional brain alterations in bipolar disorder.

Chirag Khatri

Chirag Khatri is a Master's student at USC studying Computer Science and AI. His current research at USC's Center for Economic and Social Research focuses on understanding social networks and chronic diseases using machine learning. Previously, he was a data scientist in industry applying causal inference, agent based modeling and deep learning to understand consumer behavior.

Olga Koumoundouros

Olga Koumoundouros is a second-year Ph.D. student at USC’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work researching youth experiencing homelessness. She focusses on ways being unhoused intersects with violence involvement and exposure, particularly gun violence, trauma symptoms, and relationships with adults. She is excited by collaborations with youth, community, and service providers that inform practical applications in progressive program development in service of unhoused, transitional aged adults and youth wellbeing. Other research interests include evidenced-based policies for violence prevention, participatory action research, survivor-centered voice, trauma-informed research models, community-engaged healing practices, housing equity, and guaranteed basic income programs

Chih An Lin

Chih-An Lin(Joanne) is a Master Candidate in Regulatory Science with a Pharm.D background. During the 1st year in the Master program, she assists Dr.Kuo with her skill in biostatistiac and regulatory understanding to conduct regulatory intelligence research regarding FDA's AI/ML database. As an emerging regulatory professional, she is equipped with understanding in the pharmaceutical industry and dedicated to broadening her perspective of regulatory frameworks through research.

Stan Loosmore

Stan Loosmore is a Freshman in the Iovine and Young Academy interested in the applied side of AI. He is super passionate about iterating and self-improvement.

Luca Luceri

Luca Luceri is an incoming Research Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) and a Research Scientist at the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI). His research incorporates machine learning, data and network science to identify, investigate, and mitigate online harms in socio-technical systems. Leveraging AI and machine learning, he models and detects adversarial, inauthentic behaviors and coordinated, influence campaigns on social media. Using network science and data mining methods, he investigates vulnerabilities of organic social media users, modeling influence mechanics, the dynamics of misinformation adoption, and Internet-mediated radicalization processes. His long-term goal is to enhance the resilience of the information ecosystem, including the ethical and legal considerations for social media regulation, and formulate targeted mitigation strategies for taming harm and supporting vulnerable users.

Yasi Mojab

Dr. Yasi Mojab is a licensed doctor of pharmacy specialized in nuclear medicine. She earned her Pharm.D. and Master of Science in Pharmaceutical Sciences from USC Mann School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Currently, she is pursuing her Ph.D. in pharmaceutical and translational sciences from the University of Southern California. She serves as the program coordinator of USC's international program.

Negar Mokhberian

Negar Mokhberian is a PhD candidate at the USC Computer Science department. Her research focuses on investigating disagreements in human annotations within supervised learning tasks. Negar joined USC in the fall of 2018 and holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran.

Byeongjun Moon

Byeongjun Moon is a second-year undergraduate student at the USC Iovine and Young Academy, pursuing a B.S. in Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation. His research interests lie in natural language processing, unsupervised learning algorithms, and developing intelligent systems for file management. Byeongjun's current work focuses on creating a context-aware command-line interface that leverages AI techniques like clustering, outlier detection, and NLP to analyze file content and suggest optimal folder structures and naming conventions. Previously, he has conducted research in design ethnography for improving user experiences and governance models for decentralized crypto communities. Learn more about Byeongjun at byeongjunmoon.com.

Hannah Murray

Hannah is a first-year PhD student advised by Dr. Bistra Dilkina. She holds a BS in Industrial Engineering and an MS in Analytics from Georgia Tech. She is broadly interested in AI for biodiversity conservation, utilizing machine learning and optimization to derive insights into the awareness and preservation of the most endangered species on Earth

Shuya Pan

Shuya Pan is an associate professor at Renmin University of China with a keen interest in AI ethics, human-robotic communication, and emerging media such as VR/AR/XR. Currently, she is a visiting researcher at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. With a dedication to exploring the evolving dynamics of human-technology interaction, Pan's research aims to unravel the complexities of our digital world, contributing to a deeper understanding of how we can navigate the ethical challenges posed by advancing technologies.

Gabriela Pinto

My name is Gabriela Pinto, and I am a 1st year PhD student working at Emilio Ferrar's HUMANS Lab. My main research interests are in multimodality and social media analysis.

Jaspreet Ranjit

I am a 2nd Year PhD Student advised by Prof. Swabha Swayamdipta in the NLP department. My research interests lie in investigating how language models can help us understand social issues by exploring collaborative settings between humans and generative models, and reasoning about the broader implications of fairness in applications of NLP for social good. I want to explore the development of structured datasets that incorporate social dynamics to drive our understanding of societal issues such as homelessness. In a recent project, we explore collaborative settings between humans and LLMs to characterize complex attitudes towards homelessness on social media.

Gustavo Ruiz

Gustavo Ruiz, known as Gus, is an undergraduate student at California State University, Fullerton, where he is majoring in Computer Engineering. His specialization lies in Microcontrollers, IoT's, CAD and Prototype design. Beyond his academic pursuits, Gus is actively involved in taking the lead role in projects aimed at enhancing security measures, collecting automotive diagnostic data for analysis, and revamping outdated car systems with modern features. Outside of academia, Gus is an avid automotive track enthusiast, often intertwining his projects with his hobbies. He atends a yearly convention and aspires to compete in a racing division after graduation.

Abel Salinas

Abel Salinas is currently in his second year of pursuing a Ph.D. under the guidance of Dr. Fred Morstatter. His research is centered on identifying implicit bias in large language models (LLMs). Abel joined USC's ISI in early 2020 while simultaneously working towards his master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Southern California. He holds a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from California State University, Los Angeles.

Sanskruti Sharma

A student with a passion for pharmacy and chemistry eager to explore fields such as AI, Bioinformatics, and Machine learning to explore the extent of computational techniques’ potential in medicine. Currently pursuing a Masters Degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences from Alfred E. Mann. School of Pharmacy, University of Southern California.

Taiwei Shi

Taiwei Shi is a Ph.D. student at University of Southern California, advised by Professor Jieyu Zhao. Previously, he graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Computer Science degree, where he was fortunately to be advised by Prof. Diyi Yang and Prof. Mark Riedl. He is from Dongguan, China. His research interest mainly revolves around natural language processing and computational social science. Recently, he is particularly excited about alignment, model safety, and human-AI interaction.

Chanavi Singh

As a Master's student at the Collaboratory for Algorithmic Techniques and Artificial Intelligence at USC, Chanavi Singh's academic interests span the breadth of Data Science, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. In her upcoming poster presentation, Chanavi will delve into the field of Intelligent Scheduling, highlighting the lab's longstanding contributions to it. She will outline some cornerstone algorithmic techniques and share insights into their practical, real-world applications.

Sara Hope Smith

Sara Hope Smith, a creative leader with over 20 years of experience in marketing, tech innovation, data, and product design, stands out as the visionary CEO of an emerging tech company. Her fervent dedication to innovating within smart cities, retail media networks, and security landscapes has propelled her to prominence. This journey of impactful leadership and innovation is rooted in a solid educational foundation from the University of Southern California's Iovine and Young Academy (USC IYA), where she masterfully blended design, technology, and business strategies. Sara has led numerous successful product development and marketing initiatives, earning recognitionfor their significant impact. Sara has been at the forefront of developing advanced security, ad tech, and pattern-of-life data solutions, employing data-driven AI to enhance brand strategies. Her innovative approach seamlessly integrates with retail operations, providing robust first-party data essential for marketing initiatives, loyalty programs, and customer engagement.

Alexander Spangher

Alexander Spangher is now in his 5th year PhD in CS at USC; he was a writer and data scientist at the New York Times from 2014-2018. His research focuses primarily on computational journalism. He builds models to help (1) surface newsworthy stories (2) recommend sources (3) structure and narrate stories and (4) handle updating events. His vision is that these 4 directions can come together to build a tool that will help lower the cost for local journalists reporting the news. His work is widely published in top NLP conferences, and has received an Outstanding Paper Award at NAACL 2022. He is advised by Jonathan May, Emilio Ferrara and Nanyun Peng (at UCLA) and he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University last year, where he embedded on a local news team called "Stanford Big Local News". He is extremely fortunate to be a Bloomberg Fellow, which has supported with a 4-year PhD fellowship.

Tingting Tang

Tingting is a PhD candidate at USC's Computer Science Department, focusing on privacy-preserving machine learning. Her research encompasses differentially private graph neural networks (GNNs), machine unlearning of Large Language Models (LLMs), secure GNN using multi-party computation (MPC), and Byzantine resilient coded computing.

Belinda Tang

Meet Belinda Tang, a USC graduate student and researcher within the In Vivo Group under USC Professor and Principal Investigator Alexander Titus. Passionate about equitable outcomes in this era of AI proliferation, she delves into the state of Federated Learning, what federated model training means for AI development, and its future. Belinda has contributed to projects involving autonomous vehicle lane navigation built on Waymo datasets and big data analysis of FDA databases. A skilled drone pilot and world traveler fluent in four languages, her diverse interests span tech, sports, literature, and beyond, embodying a pursuit of knowledge and adventure.

Bill Tang

Bill is a fourth-year PhD student in Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Southern California. His research interests are in causal inference and optimization approaches towards social policy issues like homelessness.

James Wang

James Wang is a junior studying Dr. Dre's innovation school at USC and conducting research at the In Vivo Group at the USC Informational Sciences Institute. James is currently a Market Intelligence Fellow at IMPaCT Care, the nation's leading community health worker system. He will serve as a policy fellow in the summer at the Los Angeles Department of Public Health (LADPH) in their leading consumer protection unit. James is a Warren G. Bennis Scholar and a Leonard D. Schaeffer Fellow at USC. James founded The OK Foundation and has previously worked at organizations like Zappos.com, SAP, Mighty Health (YC S19), Canal and other top organizations.

Henry Warren

Hi there! My name is Henry Warren. I’m a student at the Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy at USC, pursuing Arts, Technology, and the Business of Innovation. I have a profound interest and focus in mixed reality and machine learning/AI in regards to human interfacing. I started exploring these spaces in my early teens. Since then, I founded QuestCraft, a community that ported Minecraft Java Edition to the Meta Quest and Quest 2 VR headsets, as well as co-founded a tech accessibility startup aiming to assist people with disabilities in Los Angeles and eventually the greater United States. Today, I continue to pursue new frontiers of these technologies in hopes to participate in paving a brighter future of technology working for and with the people instead of against them.

Johnny Wei

Hi! I am a PhD candidate (since fall 2019) at the University of Southern California, where I am advised by Robin Jia. My current interest is in the legal issues of AI, and my work often takes basic concepts from inferential statistics. Previously, I earned a B.S. in Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Zhaotian Weng

Zhaotian Weng is a master's student at USC Viterbi School of Engineering, majoring in Computer Science. He works as a student researcher in the LIME lab within the USC NLP group. His research primarily revolves around Natural Language Processing (NLP), Vision-language models, and exploring the fairness and reliability of ML/NLP models.

Adrianna (Ani) Wilson

Adrianna (Ani) Wilson is a transformative figure in People Experience and HR with a decade-long track record of fostering innovative workplace cultures. As the founder of Insparkit, she leverages AI to enhance employee experiences, reflecting her commitment to cutting-edge solutions. Her notable achievements include launching entities overseas and revitalizing processes at many companies. She spearheaded women's entrepreneur groups and is a true community builder and storyteller. Currently pursuing a Master's at USC, she blends strategic insights with a design-thinking mindset, ready to tackle the challenges of tomorrow's workplace dynamics.

Sherry Xia

Sherry Xia is a Master of Science student in the Regulatory Science Program at the University of Southern California. Prior to her current role, Sherry received her Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With a great passion for life sciences, Sherry enjoys the rigor of the development and delivery processes for biomedical products. Her previous research experiences focused on preclinical drug optimization, medication policy, and pharmaceutical outcomes. Currently, Sherry shifts the focus in her research direction to explore digital therapeutics to align with her interest in innovative therapeutic development.

Louise Xie

Louise Xie is a doctoral student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her research leverages digital media and emerging technologies such as AI to transform health communication practices connected to the adaptation, mitigation, and material conditions of climate change. In doing so, her work is centered on using community-grounded and interdisciplinary approaches to achieve health equity in minoritized and vulnerable communities in the United States. Prior to graduate school, Xie worked at a consulting and communications firm for the life sciences. She received her BA in Biology & Society and minor in Asian American Studies from Cornell University.

Stephen Yang

Stephen Yang is a PhD student at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, where he is supported by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship. His research reimagines desirable futures with technologies amidst ongoing innovations, shifting policies, and social change. With an eye on temporality, he examines the rhythms of automation and the timescales of techno-futures. With Partnership on AI, Yang bridges research and practice by developing learning modules on equity-centered approaches to AI development. Previously, he interned at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research. He holds a B.S. in Communication and Information Science from Cornell University.

Yingxiao Ye

Yingxiao Ye is a 5th year PhD student in the Industrial and Systems Engineering department.His research mainly focuses on optimization under uncertainty and AI for society, with applications in housing resource allocation and biodiversity conservation.

Claude (Hana) Yoo

Claude (Hana) Yoo is a sophomore computer science major with an interest in machine learning applications on medical data. This is Claude's second year at CAIS++. They are excited to lead this research team and learn more about academia and AI for social good.

Mina Jung

Mina Jung is a sophomore at USC majoring in Neuroscience with a deep interest in its intersectionality with bioinformatics and artificial intelligence applications. She is working on the HLA Project with Dr. Serghei Mangul, Dottie Yu, and Ram Ayyala through the 2023-2024 school year as an URAP fellow.

Sonia Zhang

Sonia Zhang is a sophomore in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Los Angeles county. She is currently in Dr. Antonio Ortega's lab working on graph signal processing and its applications to machine learning.