Keynote Speakers

Gauruv Sukhatme

Gaurav S. Sukhatme is Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) and an Amazon Scholar. He is the Director of the USC School of Advanced Computing and the Executive Vice Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He holds the Donald M. Aldstadt Chair in Advanced Computing at USC. He was the Chairman of the USC Computer Science department from 2012-17. He received his undergraduate education in computer science and engineering at IIT Bombay and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from USC. Sukhatme is the co-director of the USC Robotics Research Laboratory and the USC Robotic Embedded Systems Laboratory director. His research interests are in networked robots, learning robots, and field robotics. He has published extensively in these and related areas. Sukhatme has served as PI on numerous NSF, DARPA, and NASA grants. He was a Co-PI on the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), an NSF Science and Technology Center. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, AAAI, and the IEEE, a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, the Okawa Foundation research award, and an Amazon research award. He is one of the founders of the Robotics: Science and Systems conference. He was the program chair of the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation and the 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robots and Systems. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Autonomous Robots (Springer Nature) and has served in the past as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, the IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and on the editorial board of IEEE Pervasive Computing.

Shri Narayanan

Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is vice president for presidential initiatives, research director of the Information Sciences Institute, and University Professor and Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California, where he holds appointments as professor of electrical and computer engineering, computer science, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, pediatrics and otolaryngology — head and neck surgery. Prior to USC, he was with AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research.

As vice president for presidential initiatives, he provides intellectual leadership for transformative cross-cutting interdisciplinary initiatives of the president and the university in close partnership with the president’s senior leadership team and the deans of the cognizant schools. This includes the critical “moonshot” priorities and their intersections, setting the agenda and their ethical foundations, and connecting, coordinating and integrating talent, ideas and strengths across disciplines, schools and functional units. Narayanan leads in establishing and enabling exemplar pivotal North Stars in intersectional realms across the moonshots (e.g., Health Sciences 3.0, Frontiers of Computing, Sustainable Urban Futures, USC Competes), such as artificial intelligence in medicine/health, human condition across the life span and a just and equitable society. He contributes to building strategic partnerships with academic institutions, industry, government and community partners in collaborative pursuit of these priorities, and he supports the president alongside the senior leadership team and the deans in advancement efforts in service of the strategic and cross-cutting initiatives.

Narayanan’s interdisciplinary research focuses on developing engineering approaches to understand the human condition and in creating human-centered computing technologies to support and enhance human experiences across applications with direct societal relevance including in defense/intelligence, health, education, media and the arts.

John Blosnich

John R. Blosnich is an associate professor and director of the Center for LGBTQ+ Health Equity at the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. His primary area of expertise is disparities in suicide risk and prevention among high-risk populations, with a specific emphasis on social determinants of health.

Prior to joining the faculty at USC, Blosnich spent nine years working with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA); first with the VISN2 Center of Excellence for Suicide Prevention in Canandaigua, NY and more recently with the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion in Pittsburgh, PA. At the VA, he led foundational research about transgender veterans’ health and health care utilization, with a specific focus in suicide risk, mortality, and social determinants of health. He garnered the VA’s first research award focused on transgender veterans and served on several national VA committees charged with developing guidance, clinical education, and training about veteran subgroups with high risks for suicide and adverse social determinants.

In addition to VA-supported research, he has earned competitive awards from foundations and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Among these are his work on efforts to address the lack of sexual orientation and gender identity data in mortality surveillance. As a 2021 recipient of an NIH New Innovator Award, he is spearheading research into non-clinical suicide prevention in partnership with “industries of disruption”, which is a novel conceptualization of community-based professionals whose work focuses on life disruptions (e.g., divorce, financial problems, unemployment), but who generally lack knowledge and training in suicide prevention.

Michàlle Mor Barak

Michàlle Mor Barak is in the vanguard of a new breed of social work and management experts focusing on global workforce diversity. In her award-winning book, Managing Diversity: Toward a Globally Inclusive Workplace (SAGE, 5th edition, 2022), she proposes an original model for creating an "inclusive workplace"– one that helps businesses, as well as public nonprofit organizations, integrate with society via expanding circles of inclusion at the organizational, community, state/national and international levels. The book has won the CHOICE award from the Association of College and University Libraries and the Academy of Management's Terry Book Award for "the most significant contribution to management knowledge."

Her scholarly publications were among the first to introduce the construct of inclusion to the discourse about global diversity management through groundbreaking research. Two measurement scales that Mor Barak and her research team established and validated — the Mor Barak Inclusion-Exclusion Scale (MBIE) and the Diversity Climate Scale — have been widely used in for profit and nonprofit research and in corporate employee surveys and were translated to more than ten languages.

Her current research projects focus on diversity, work-family balance, social support and corporate social responsibility. They examine the impact of organizational culture on job satisfaction, organizational commitment and retention as well as individual well-being, mental health and turnover. Her studies test theoretically based models in both nonprofit and for profit organizations nationally and internationally. Mor Barak's research demonstrates that diversity management and inclusion, when adopted as key business strategies, represent more than just doing the right and moral thing. They also constitute good business. Diversity management is essential if corporations are to adapt to an increasingly diverse workforce, and it gives them a competitive advantage in recruitment, retention, customer relations, marketing and developing a positive corporate image.

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.

Ajitesh Srivastava

 Dr. Ajitesh Srivastava is a Research Assistant Professor at the Ming Hsieh Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering. He is also an Associate 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.

He obtained his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Southern California in 2018. His research interests include network science, modeling, and machine learning applied to epidemics, social good, and social networks. He collaborates with teams around the world and the CDC for infectious disease forecasting and scenario projections. He has been a PI/co-PI of many NSF, CDC, and DARPA-funded awards. He is a DARPA Grand Challenge Winner (2014). He is also an Indian National Math Olympiad Awardee (awarded to 30 students in India in 2008).

Carl Castro

Carl Castro is currently professor and director of the Military and Veteran Programs at the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California, where he also serves as director of the USC-RAND Epstein Family Foundation Center for Veterans Policy Research. Dr. Castro served in the U.S. Army for over 30 years, first as an infantryman, before retiring at the rank of Colonel. Dr. Castro participated in the Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo Campaigns, Operation Northern Watch, and the Iraq War. Dr. Castro has chaired numerous NATO and international research groups and has served on a number of National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine committees. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Research and Education Foundation. Dr. Castro is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the National Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. His current research efforts are broad and include: (a) the exploration of the military culture that leads to acceptance and integration of service members and veterans; (b) understanding and ameliorating the effects of military trauma and stress, especially during combat and operational deployments, on service members and their families; (c) the prevention of suicides and violence, such as sexual assault and hazing and bullying; and (d) evaluating the process of transitioning into the military and transitioning from military service back to civilian life. Dr. Castro recently co-authored Boys in the Barracks, the first of a planned three volume series focused on understanding life in the U.S. Army.