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Keynote Speaker
Keynote Speaker
Robert Vargas (He/Him)
Robert Vargas (He/Him)
Associate Professor of Sociology - University of Chicago
Professor Vargas is a social scientist and data artist interested in research on cities, law, and race. His writing and teaching focus on identifying the political-economic forces shaping neighborhood conditions and city responses to social problems. His multi award-winning book Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio brought a political analysis to the study of urban violence by showing how ward redistricting shaped block-level violence in the Little Village neighborhood of Chicago. His second award-winning book, Uninsured in Chicago: How the Social Safety Net Leaves Latinos Behind (NYU Press), is a longitudinal and intersectional ethnography of uninsured Chicagoans' experiences with the Affordable Care Act. He has published in a variety of journals such as Social Problems, Criminology, and the Social Science and Medicine. Professor Vargas has won numerous awards such as the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the New Scholar Award from the American Society of Criminology, and the David Heoft Award for Newly Tenured Faculty at the University of Chicago. His research has been featured in numerous media outlets such as NBC News, Telemundo, Univision, the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine, and National Public Radio.
Professor Vargas leads the UChicago Justice Project, a research group devoted to institutional change in cities. The Justice Project is pursuing two research agendas: the first is on block-level historical trajectories of homicide, and the second is on the political economy of policing.
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Contact
Contact
Email robvargas@uchicago.edu
Dr. Abhilash Mishra (He/Him)
Dr. Abhilash Mishra (He/Him)
Founding Director - The Kevin Xu Initiative on Science, Technology, and Global Development at the Harris School of Public Policy
Dr. Abhilash Mishra is the founding director of the Kevin Xu Initiative on Science, Technology, and Global Development at the Harris School of Public Policy. He also founded Equitech Futures, a global innovation lab with more than 400 fellows worldwide. Abhilash holds an M.Phys from the University of Oxford where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar and a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Caltech.
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Contact
Contact
Email abhilashmishra@uchicago.edu
Soubhik Barari (He/Him)
Soubhik Barari (He/Him)
Senior Research Methodologist - NORC at the University of Chicago
Soubhik (sho-bik) Barari is a Senior Research Methodologist at NORC at the University of Chicago, working on problems at the intersection of survey methodology, public policy, data science, and AI.
He is also a lecturer at Columbia University and currently serves as the Vice President for the New York Association of Public Opinion Research. He has published on topics ranging from AI-assisted survey research, the effects of political deepfakes, and political appeals from corporate brands in the Journal of Politics, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Nature Scientific Data. Previously, he's worked in research and data science roles at SurveyMonkey and Microsoft Research. Soubhik holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and an A.M. in Statistics from Harvard University and a B.S. in Computer Science and Mathematics from Tufts University.
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Contact
Contact
Email barari-soubhik@norc.org
Mario Rodriguez (He/Him)
Mario Rodriguez (He/Him)
Sr. Agentic AI Engineer
Mario Rodriguez is an AI Solutions Consultant at the Inter-American Development Bank and a former AI Robotics Engineer and operator of Sophia the Robot, the first humanoid robot. He previously co-founded Arivey, a SaaS startup recognized by the AWS Build Accelerator 2023 and Founder Institute Toronto 2024. Mario holds a master’s degree with honors in Optimization and Applied Computation from UAEM in Mexico, where he conducted research on Mexican Sign Language recognition. He has led more than 20 AI/ML projects and holds certifications from PMI, MIT Professional Education, IBM, and AWS. His interests focus on human-computer interaction, multi-agent systems, and the intersection of AI, entrepreneurship, and exponential ecosystems.
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Contact
Contact
Email mariorodtcun@gmail.com
Meghnad Bose (He/Him)
Meghnad Bose (He/Him)
Assistant Professor of Practice - University of Memphis
Meghnad Bose is an award-winning investigative journalist with over ten years of experience as a reporter and editor. He currently teaches journalism and heads the MA program in Open-Source Investigative Reporting at the University of Memphis. In addition, he continues to work on his own reporting projects, including at The Institute for Public Service Reporting.
Prior to joining the University of Memphis, Bose was based in New York, as a reporter and Delacorte Fellow at Columbia Journalism Review, and as an independent journalist reporting for publications such as The Intercept, Drop Site News, Documented, Hyperallergic, Votebeat, New York Focus and more. Bose is an alum of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Before moving to the US, Bose worked as a reporter and editor in India, where his investigations tracked down discrepancies in a government-run COVID relief fund, exposed the modus operandi of organized anti-Muslim lynch mobs, and uncovered the tampering of marks of millions of high school students. He is a two-time recipient of the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award, considered India’s top journalism honor, and a five-time winner of the South Asian Digital Media Award conferred by the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).
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Contact
Contact
Email mb5153@columbia.edu
Shaolei Ren (He/Him)
Shaolei Ren (He/Him)
Associate Professor - University of California, Riverside
Shaolei Ren is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, Riverside. His research broadly focuses on developing modeling frameworks, algorithmic foundations and empirical methodologies to address challenges in AI, systems, and community. His work has informed AI governance frameworks adopted by international organizations and government agencies, and has also driven industry innovation, including the development of real-time ecological footprint reporting for computer systems. He is a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2015) and several paper awards, including at ACM e-Energy (2024, 2016) and IEEE ICC (2016). He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.
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Contact
Contact
Email shaolei@ucr.edu
Ningzi Li (She/Her)
Ningzi Li (She/Her)
Professional Research Specialist & Adjunct Assistant Professor of Organizations and Strategy - Data Science Insitute (DSI) and the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago
Ningzi Li is a professional research specialist at the Data Science Insitute (DSI) and adjunct assistant professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. She studies communication and behaviors in organizations.
A first stream of her research emphasizes how organizations use language to gain a competitive advantage in different contexts such as earnings conferences, entrepreneurial pitches, and sustainability reports. She views language as an essential tool that firms use to gain the support of various stakeholders, expanding the behavioral theory of the firm. A second stream examines language as an artifact of organizational culture and cognition. She studies the relationship between a firm's culture, managerial cognition, and financial decisions in the contexts of employee reviews and product recalls. Her analyses build on natural experiments and natural language processing tools.
Li earned a doctoral degree in sociology from Cornell University and received B.A. in sociology and economics from Tsinghua University. Prior to joining UofC, she taught at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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Contact
Contact
Email ningzi@uchicago.edu
Dr. Su Lin Blodgett (She/Her)
Dr. Su Lin Blodgett (She/Her)
Visiting Researcher at Mila - Quebec AI Institute
Su Lin Blodgett is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work focuses on creating more equitable, just, and empowering natural language processing (NLP) technologies by centering people—who are inseparable from language—in technologies’ development and evaluation. Her recent work has addressed principled evaluation and measurement, particularly of generative AI capabilities, behaviours, and impacts; understanding how people perceive and use generative AI; and supporting AI and NLP practitioners in their ethical work. She was previously a principal researcher in the Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics (FATE) group at Microsoft Research Montréal. She earned her PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and has been named as one of the 2022 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics.
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Contact
Contact
Email sulin.blodgett@gmail.com
Skyler B. Johnson, MD (He/Him)
Skyler B. Johnson, MD (He/Him)
Assistant Professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology - University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Institute
Skyler B. Johnson, MD is a radiation oncologist and physician–scientist at the University of Utah School of Medicine and Huntsman Cancer Institute whose work focuses on how misinformation, trust, and communication influence cancer care. He is internationally recognized for pioneering research demonstrating that patients who pursue unproven cancer treatments instead of evidence-based care experience worse survival outcomes, and for quantifying the impact of health misinformation across digital platforms. His work has been cited over 1,000 times, featured in major media outlets, and incorporated into global policy efforts, including the World Health Organization cancer report. Dr. Johnson also leads clinical programs in prostate cancer and theranostics and serves in national leadership roles advancing ethics, communication, and patient-centered care in a data-driven healthcare landscape.
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Contact
Contact
Email Skyler.Johnson@hci.utah.edu
Dr. Vineet Aror, MD, MAPP (NAM) (She/Her)
Dr. Vineet Aror, MD, MAPP (NAM) (She/Her)
Herbert T. Abelson Professor of Medicine, Dean for Medical Education at the Pritzker School of Medicine, and Vice Dean of Education in the Biological Sciences Division at the University of Chicago
Dr. Vineet Arora, MD, MAPP (NAM) Dr. Vineet Arora, MD, MAPP (NAM) is a Herbert T.
Abelson Professor of Medicine and serves as Dean for Medical Education at the Pritzker School of
Medicine and Vice Dean of Education in the Biological Sciences Division at the University of
Chicago. Dr. Arora is also an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine whose work
improving care and learning in teaching hospitals has been funded by NIH, AHRQ, the FDA, and
the Macy Foundation, has been cited over 10,000 times and been covered in numerous local and
national news media. Her work on improving sleep, fatigue and handoffs was influential in
improving working conditions for residents. She previously served on the board of the ABIM and
currently serves on the boards of Costs of Care, the Joint Commission and the Journal of Hospital
Medicine for the Society of Hospital Medicine.
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