Cynthia Matuszek is an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the director and founder of UMBC’s Interactive Robotics and Language lab. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Her research is focused on how robots can learn grounded language from interactions with non-specialists, which includes work in not only robotics, but human-robot interactions, natural language, and machine learning, informed by a background in common-sense reasoning and classical artificial intelligence. Dr. Matuszek has published in machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, and human-robot interaction venues. She was named one of IEEE Spectrum’s 10 to Watch in AI and has received an NSF career award as well as a UMBC early faculty achievement award.

Siddharth Srivastava is an Associate Professor of Computer Science in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University.  He received his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and did his postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on safe and reliable taskable AI systems and AI assessment. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, a Best Paper award at the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), an Outstanding Dissertation award at UMass Amherst, and a Best Final Year Thesis Award at IIT Kanpur. He served as conference Co-Chair for ICAPS 2019 and currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of AI Research.

Jamie C. Macbeth is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Smith College and an adjunct associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences.  His work has been funded by a Young Faculty Researcher award from the Toyota Research Institute and by the Office of Naval Research Summer Faculty Research Program.  From 2019 to 2021 he was a Martin Luther King, Jr. visiting scholar at MIT CSAIL, and in 2018 he was named Graduate Teacher of the Year at Fairfield University by Alpha Sigma Nu, the National Jesuit Honor Society.  He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA and an M.S. in Physics from Stanford University.  His research builds cognitive artificial intelligence systems to better understand the flexible representations of thinking and reasoning, drawing a distinction between structures of thought from structures of language, and exploring the content of non-linguistic and iconic mental imagery representations and their intersections with understanding, vision, robotics, commonsense, and planning.

Brittany Johnson-Matthews is Associate Professor of Computer Science at George Mason University, where she directs the INSPIRED (INterdisciplinary Software Practice Improvement REsearch and Development) Lab.  She got her PhD in Computer Science from North Carolina State University 7 years ago, and then was a Postdoctoral Fellow at UMass - Amherst for 3 years. In her research, she explores socio technical problems pertaining to developer productivity and software development/use, such as tool support, work environments, ethics, and software for social good. Her research is interdisciplinary, cross-cutting with research in software engineering, human-computer interaction, and intelligent systems (AI/ML).