KEYNOTE SERIES

Snehasis Mukhopadhyay

(Professor ,Purdue University)

Bio: Dr. Snehasis Mukhopadhyay is a Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Science at Purdue University, Indianapolis, USA. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University, USA, and a Master’s degree (with a Gold Medal) from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. He received a CAREER award from the United States National Science Foundation for integrating research and education. He has continuously received research funding from United States government agencies including National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and United States Department of Agriculture. He has twice received the Indiana University Trustees Teaching Awards (TTA) in the years 2014 and 2017. He has provided extensive professional services including being National Science Foundation grant proposal review panelist on numerous occasions, and being the General Chair of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge management (ACM CIKM). In the year 2023, he served as an invited member of the National Academies Panel on Assessment of Military Information Sciences Research Program at the Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen, Maryland. His current research interests are in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Interactive Data Science, and Computer/Computational Science Education Research. He has published more than 100 research papers in these areas.

Title of Talk: Interactive Artificial Intelligence and Its Applications

Abstract: As information technology gradually infiltrates highly specialized socio-technological domains such as healthcare and education, a crucial question remains as to whether human experts with advanced training and experience-driven intuitive mental models or AI systems with their empirical highly nonlinear data-driven models are to be preferred in making decisions. This is a question for which vigorous debate is going on extensively in society. We, however, take the viewpoint that it is not an either-or choice, but for the most successful systems, a seamless integration of human intuition with machine learning based empirical models is necessary. This is the underlying spirit of our proposed human-in-the-loop, interactive machine learning (IML) methodology. In the first part of this talk, we will discuss a computational framework for learning happening between a machine (an algorithm) and a human user. This framework is termed as “Interactive Artificial Intelligence”. In the second part of the talk, we will discuss some applications of interactive artificial intelligence to socio-technological problems arising in many domains. Such applications include Smart Health and Smart Education.

Bio: Eve Psalti is 20-year year tech and business leader, currently the Senior Director at Microsoft’s Azure AI engineering organization responsible for scaling and commercializing artificial intelligence solutions. She was previously the Head of Strategic Platforms at Google Cloud where she worked with F500 companies helping them grow their businesses through digital transformation initiatives.

Prior to Google, Eve held business development, sales and marketing leadership positions at Microsoft and startups across the US and Europe leading 200-people teams and $600M businesses.

A native of Greece, she holds a Master’s degree and several technology and business certifications from London Business School and the University of Washington. Eve currently serves on the board of WE Global Studios, a full-stack startup innovation studio supporting female entrepreneurs.

(Professor ,San Diego State University)

Bio: Dr. Mahasweta Sarkar – Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and she serves as the Director of the WIreless Networks and Communication (WINC) Laboratory at San Diego State University (SDSU). She received the Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science (Summa Cum Laude) from SDSU and Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from University of California, San Diego.

Her research focuses on wireless networks, with emphasis on developing artificial intelligence-infused MAC layer algorithms for applications that have high social impact like precision agriculture, healthcare, brain-computer interfaces and connecting-the-unconnected. Along with her students and research collaborators of her WIreless Networks and Communication (WINC) Lab, strive to make the world a more connected and better place!

Currently, she serves as the Senior Associate Dean of Global Campus(formerly the College of Extended Studies) at SDSU. In this role, she  leverages the expertise and leadership to enhance the university’s global reach and educational initiatives.

Bio : Dr. Abdali is a Senior Researcher at Applied Sciences Group (ASG) working on a variety of NLP and multimodal tasks including customization and distillation of Microsoft Turing and Microsoft Phi  LLMs/SLMs for downstream tasks, multitask architectures, multimodal generative models, causa and more recently multimodal conversational agents. Before joining Microsoft, she was a postdoctoral CIFellow at Georgia Tech, working on my NSF funded project, “Adversarially robust multimodal misinformation detection”. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside (UCR), where she received the Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship Award , which fully funded her studies. During the Ph.D., she mainly worked on misinformation detection leveraging multilinear (tensor) algebra along with a variety of NLP and vision techniques. She also worked on Deepfake video detection and development of text augmentation techniques in few-shot settings. In fall 2020, she completed a research internship at Lenovo Research,  where the worked on deep learning-based image enhancement. In summer 2021, she finished another internship at Microsoft where she worked on development of cutting-edge NLP techniques.

Eugene Agichtein
(Professor, Emory University)

Bio : Eugene Agichtein is a Professor in the Computer Science department at Emory University. Dr. Agichtein founded and leads the Emory Intelligent Information Access Laboratory (IR Lab). Eugene’s general research interests are in web search and information retrieval, conversational search, and more generally in text and data mining, social media analysis, and human-computer interaction. Eugene received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University, and a B.S. in Engineering from The Cooper Union. Eugene was a Sloan Research Fellow, a past member of the DARPA Computer Science Study Group, and a recipient of four best paper awards from SIGMOD, SIGIR, WSDM, and ICDE conferences, and test-of-time awards from WSDM and SIGIR. His work has been supported by grants from DARPA, IARPA, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation, and by gifts and grants from industry, including Amazon, Google, Home Depot, HP Labs, Microsoft, and Yahoo! Labs. Since January 2019, Dr. Agichtein has been a part-time “Amazon Scholar” (Principal Scientist) at Amazon Alexa.

Luyuan Fang
(CEO and Founder, Curative AI)