Speakers

Dr. Ruha Benjamin is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founder of the Just Data Lab, and author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013) and Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2014) among other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. Professor Benjamin is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study, and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. For more info visit, www.ruhabenjamin.com

Dr. Dina Katabi is the Andrew & Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She is also the director of the MIT’s Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award. Professor Katabi received her PhD and MS from MIT in 2003 and 1999, and her Bachelor of Science from Damascus University in 1995. Katabi's research focuses on innovations in mobile computing, wireless sensing, and machine learning with application to digital health. Her research has been recognized with ACM Prize in Computing, the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the SIGCOMM test of Time Award, the Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship, a Sloan Fellowship, the NBX Career Development chair, and the NSF CAREER award. Her students received the ACM Best Doctoral Dissertation Award in Computer Science and Engineering twice. Further, her work was recognized by the IEEE William R. Bennett prize, three ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper awards, an NSDI Best Paper award, and a TR10 award. Several start-ups have been spun out of Katabi's lab such as PiCharging and Emerald.

Dr. Zhiyong Lu is a Senior Investigator at the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) Intramural Research Program, leading research in biomedical text and image processing, information retrieval, and machine learning. As Deputy Director for Literature Search at National Center of Biotechnology Information (NCBI), Dr. Lu also directs the overall R&D efforts to improve literature search and information access (e.g. LitCovid). Over the years, Dr. Lu has mentored over 40 trainees and is a highly cited author with ~200 peer-review articles. Dr. Lu is a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI) and an Associate Editor of Bioinformatics and Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. In this talk, Dr. Lu will present his cutting-edge research on human-centered Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods in Healthcare, from machine diagnosis of Age-related Macular Degeneration (AMD) to keeping up with COVID-19 literature in LitCovid. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/bionlp

Dr. Fay Cobb Payton is a national and international recognized researcher in health care systems, data quality/modeling, tech innovation and inclusive STEM leadership. She is the author of over 100 technical publications, a speaker for academic and industry professional conferences and an associate editor for a number of computing-related journals. She is a University Faculty Scholar and Full Professor of Information Technology at North Carolina State University. Dr. Payton was selected as the North Carolina Tech Educator of the Year. She was selected as an American Council on Education Fellow and worked in industry as an industrial and systems engineer, consultant and programmer at IBM, Time Inc. and E&Y prior to joining the academy. She is a National Science Foundation Program Director and supports a number of agency-wide initiatives along with Computer, Information Sciences & Engineering (CISE) directorate programs (Education & Workforce; Smart & Connected Health). As a Dual-Degree student, Dr. Payton earned a BS in Industrial & Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a BA in Accounting with a minor in Mathematics from Clark Atlanta University. She earned an MBA in Decision Sciences from Clark Atlanta University and a PhD in Information & Decision Systems (with a secondary area of Health Care Systems) from Case Western Reserve University.

Dr. Tara M. Sinclair is an associate professor of economics and international affairs at the George Washington University and a senior fellow at job search site Indeed. Sinclair earned her PhD in economics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2005. As part of the Indeed Hiring Lab, Sinclair uses Indeed’s unique labor market data to develop new economic indicators. She is also co-director of the GW Research Program on Forecasting, a member of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Technical Advisory Committee, a research professor at the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) in Germany, and a research associate at the Center for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis (CAMA) at the Australian National University.

Dr. Frida Polli is the CEO and founder of pymetrics, a company pioneering the use of behavioral science and AI to make workforce decisions more accurate and fair. Prior to pymetrics, Frida was a neuroscientist at Harvard and MIT for a decade. From 2001-2007, Dr. Polli was a predoctoral NRSA fellow at MGH/Harvard in the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Group with Scott Rauch and Randy Buckner. Her imaging dissertation on the default mode network was published in PNAS in 2005. Until 2010, she was postdoctoral NRSA fellow in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT in Gabrieli Lab. She ran large, multimodal imaging studies looking to predict treatment outcomes in depression and anxiety. She was named a NARSAD Young Investigator in 2008 and won the MIT 100K in 2010. She transitioned out of academia through the MBA program at Harvard, where she was a Life Science Fellow. After getting her MBA in 2012, she founded pymetrics. Global 2000 companies who use pymetrics have seen significant improvements in hiring outcomes and diversity. pymetrics is venture-backed by Khosla Ventures, Jazz Venture Partners and Workday Ventures. Frida has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, and NPR, and been featured in the Economist, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, WIRED, Inc., Harvard Business Review, and others.

Sharad Goel is an assistant professor at Stanford University in the Department of Management Science & Engineering, with courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Sociology, and the Law School. He's the founder and director of the Stanford Computational Policy Lab, a group that develops technology to tackle pressing issues in criminal justice, education, voting rights, and beyond. In his research, Sharad looks at public policy through the lens of computer science, bringing a new, computational perspective to a diverse range of contemporary social issues, including policing practices, electoral integrity, online privacy, and media bias. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sharad completed a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at Cornell University, and worked as a senior researcher at Microsoft.

Dr. Rashida Richardson is Director of Policy Research at New York University’s AI Now Institute, where she designs, implements, and coordinates AI Now’s research strategy and initiatives on the topics of law, policy, and civil rights. She previously worked as Legislative Counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union of New York (NYCLU), where she led the organization’s work on privacy, technology, surveillance, and education issues. Prior to the NYCLU, she was a staff attorney at the Center for HIV Law and Policy, where she worked on a wide-range of HIV-related legal and policy issues nationally, and she previously worked at Facebook Inc. and HIP Investor in San Francisco. Rashida currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Wesleyan University, the Advisory Board of the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, the Board of Directors of the College & Community Fellowship, Advisory Board for the Center for Investigative Reporting, Advisory Board for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and she is an affiliate and Advisory Board member of the Center for Critical Race + Digital Studies. She received her BA with honors in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University and her JD from Northeastern University School of Law.

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee is a senior fellow in the Brookings Institution Center for Technology Innovation, where she addresses the regulatory and legislative policies of telecommunications, current and emerging technologies with a particular focus on the equitable access and distribution of digital resources. Her current research portfolio includes artificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning algorithms and their unintended consequences on marginalized communities. Her recent co-authored paper on the subject has made her a sought out speaker in the U.S. and around the world on the topics of digital futures, AI and ethics, algorithmic bias, and the intersection between technology and civil/human rights. She is also an expert on topics that include online privacy, 5G networks and the digital divide. Dr. Turner Lee has a forthcoming book on the U.S. digital divide titled Digitally Invisible: How the Internet is Creating the New Underclass (forthcoming 2021, Brookings Press). She sits on various U.S. federal agency and civil society boards. Dr. Turner Lee has a Ph.D. and M.A. from Northwestern University and graduated from Colgate University.

Dr. Girish Chowdhary is an assistant professor and Donald Biggar Willet Faculty Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the director of the Field Robotics Engineering and Science Hub (FRESH) at UIUC and the Chief Scientist on the Illinois Autonomous Farm. Girish is affiliated with Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering. He holds a PhD (2010) from Georgia Institute of Technology in Aerospace Engineering. He was a postdoc at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2011-2013), and an assistant professor at Oklahoma State University’s Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department (2013-2016). He also worked with the German Aerospace Center's (DLR's) Institute of Flight Systems for around three years (2003-2006). Girish has authored 90+ publications in autonomy and robotics, and Principle Investigator on several federally funded grants, including an ONR MURI. Girish’s work on AI and adaptive flight control led to the Dave Ward memorial award by the Aerospace Guidance and Controls committee. He is the winner of the Air Force Young Investigator Award, and several best paper awards, including a best systems paper award at RSS 2018 for his recent work on the agricultural robot TerraSentia. He is the co-founder of EarthSense Inc. (www.earthsense.co), working towards making sustainable farming profitable with ultralight field robots.

Dr. Steven Mirsky is a Research Ecologist in the Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC), Beltsville, Maryland. He joined ARS in 2008 after receiving a BA in Agroecology, M.S. in Soil Fertility/Quality and Ph.D. in Agronomy (emphasis: Weed Ecology). Steven takes a transdisciplinary, systems approach to developing sustainable agricultural systems in conventional and organic field crop production systems. His work includes applied, basic, and theoretical approaches to interactions affecting crop production sustainability. He works across the agriculture sector in large regional and national teams to merge precision and sustainable agriculture with remote sensing, deep learning techniques, and real-time data flow and analytic platforms. He manages two of the cropping system experiments that contribute to the Lower Chesapeake Bay – LTAR and is the co-director of a national on-farm (~140 farms) research program evaluating the implications of cover crops on crop performance (productivity, health, and resilience), and water, nitrogen, and pest dynamics. He is the Project Director for the National Cover Crop Breeding program, a collaboration between USDA, Universities, non-profit organizations, private industry, and farmers. Dr. Mirsky is PI for the area-wide National Integrated Weed Management project. He helped co-found the Northeast Cover Crop Council, and is working with NRCS and the regional Cover Crop Councils to build modular web-based, decision support tools, data management platforms, and information visualizations.

Dr. Georgia (Gina) Tourassi is the Director of the National Center for Computational Sciences at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Concurrently, she holds appointments as an adjunct Professor of Radiology at Duke University and the University of Tennessee and as a joint UT-ORNL Professor of the Bredesen Center Data Science Program at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Her scholarly work includes 13 US patents and innovation disclosures and more than 250 peer-reviewed journal articles, conference proceedings articles, editorials, and book chapters. She is elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the American Association of Medical Physicists, and the International Society for Optics and Photonics. She is Senior member and Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Her research interests include artificial intelligence in biomedicine, biomedical informatics, clinical decision support, digital epidemiology, and data-driven biomedical discovery. Dr. Tourassi holds a B.S. degree in Physics from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University.

Dr. Sandra Wachter is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow in Law and Ethics of AI, Big Data, and robotics as well as Internet Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Prof Wachter is also a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School , a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London, a Fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Values, Ethics and Innovation, an Academic Affiliate at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford’s Law Faculty and a member of the Law Committee of the IEEE. Prof Wachter is specialising in technology-, IP-, data protection and non-discrimination law as well as European-, International-, (online) human rights,- and medical law. Her current research focuses on the legal and ethical implications of AI, Big Data, and robotics as well as profiling, inferential analytics, explainable AI, algorithmic bias, diversity, and fairness, governmental surveillance, predictive policing, and human rights online.

Dr. Dalal Najib leads Science and Engineering Capacity Development activities at the Policy and Global Affairs (PGA) Division of the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM). She is the program director for the Arab-American Frontiers program of Science, Engineering and Medicine at NASEM in partnership with MENA based S&T institutions with support from NSF, USAID and NASA. Dr. Najib also worked on the USAID- funded Partnership for Enhanced engagement in Research (PEER) program where she managed the Africa, Middle-East and more recently the Central Asia transboundary water resources management portfolio. Dr. Najib first joined the National Academies as a Mirzayan Science and Technology policy fellow at the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB). She holds a PhD in Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering from University of Michigan, with support from the NASA Earth and Space Sciences Fellowship (NESSF). She also completed a master's degree in public policy (MPP) from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy with a focus on science and technology policy in developing countries. Prior to that, she received her undergraduate degree in aerospace and aeronautical engineering from Supaero (Toulouse, France). She is fluent in French, Arabic, English and Spanish.