Speaker Biographies

Kavita Bala is the Chair of the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. She received her S.M. and Ph.D. from MIT, her B.Tech. from IIT (Bombay), and co-founded GrokStyle (recently acquired by Facebook). Bala specializes in computer vision and computer graphics, leading research in recognition and visual search; material modeling and acquisition using physics and learning; and perception. Bala has authored the graduate-level textbook “Advanced Global Illumination”, and has served as the Editor-in-Chief of Transactions on Graphics (TOG), and as chair of SIGGRAPH Asia Papers in 2011. Her work on 3D Mandalas was featured at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York.

Sumanta is broadly interested in developing statistical machine learning methods for structure learning and prediction of complex, high-dimensional systems arising in biological and social sciences. He is acurrently working in two areas: (a) network modeling of high-dimensional time series; and (b) detecting high-order interactions in complex biological systems using randomized tree ensembles. He also works closely with scientists and economists on a wide range of problems, including prostate cancer progression, large scale metabolomics, and systemic risk monitoring in financial markets. Before joining Cornell, Sumanta was a postdoctoral scholar (2014-2016) in the Department of Statistics, UC Berkeley and the Biosciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . He received his PhD (2014) from the Department of Statistics, University of Michigan , and his bachelors (2006) and masters (2008) in Statistics from Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.

Austin Benson is an assistant professor of Computer Science and a field member in the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. His research is focused on the development of numerical methods for improving the analysis of complex datasets that are pervasive in science and engineering. Professor Benson’s research has appeared in Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and SIAM Review, and has been recognized with a KDD best paper award and the Gene Golub doctoral Dissertation Award. Before starting at Cornell, he received his PhD in computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford and undergraduate degrees in computer science and applied mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Claire Cardie is the John C. Ford Professor of Engineering in the Departments of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University. She was the founding Chair of Cornell’s Information Science Department and works in the area of Natural Language Processing (NLP) on topics ranging from information extraction, text summarization and noun phrase coreference resolution to the automatic analysis of opinions, argumentation and deception in text. Cardie was selected as a Fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2015. She has served on the executive committees of the ACL, NAACL and AAAI, and has been Program Chair for a number of major conferences in NLP including ACL, EMNLP, CoNLL, and COLING as well as General Chair for ACL 2018 in Melbourne.

Ranveer Chandra is the Chief Scientist at Microsoft Azure Global. His research has shipped in multiple Microsoft products, including Windows, Visual Studio, XBOX, and Azure. Ranveer is leading the FarmBeats, battery research, and TV white space research projects at Microsoft. His work on FarmBeats was featured by Bill Gates on GatesNotes, and he has been invited to present his research on FarmBeats to the Secretary of Agriculture, and on TV White Spaces to the FCC Chairman. Ranveer has published over 90 research papers, and has over 100 patents that have been granted by the USPTO. He has won several awards, including best paper awards, and the MIT Technology Review’s Top Innovators Under 35. Ranveer has an undergraduate degree from IIT Kharagpur, India and a PhD from Cornell University.

Eshan Chattopadhyay is an assistant professor in the computer science department at Cornell University. His research focuses on the use of randomness in computation with applications to cryptography. Before this he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and Microsoft Research Fellow at the Simons Institute, Berkeley. He finished his graduate studies at UT Austin under David Zuckerman.

Tanzeem Choudhury is a Professor in Computing and Information Sciences at Cornell University and a co-founder of HealthRhythms Inc, a company whose mission is to add the layer of behavioral health into all of healthcare. At Cornell, she directs the People-Aware Computing group, which works on inventing the future of technology-assisted well-being. Tanzeem received her PhD from the Media Laboratory at MIT. She has been awarded the MIT Technology Review TR35 award, NSF CAREER award, TED Fellowship, Kavli Fellowship, ACM Distinguished Membership, and UbiComp 10-year Impact Award. For more information, please visit: http://pac.cs.cornell.edu

Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil is an assistant professor in the information science department at Cornell University.  His research aims at developing computational methods that can lead to a better understanding of our conversational practices, supporting tools that can improve the way we communicate online.  He is the recipient of several awards—including an NSF CAREER Award, the WWW 2013 Best Paper Award, a CSCW 2017 Best Paper Award, and two Google Faculty Research Awards—and his work has been featured in popular media outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, NBC’s The Today Show, NPR and the New York Times.

Anil Damle is an assistant professor of Computer Science at Cornell University where he works at the intersection of numerical linear algebra and a broad range of application areas. His work includes the development of efficient and robust algorithms that leverage the underlying physical and/or statistical structure of problems. Anil received his BS and MS from the University of Colorado, Boulder in 2011 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2016.

Christopher De Sa is an Assistant Professor in the Cornell Department of Computer Science, with additional field membership in ECE and Statistics. His research covers algorithmic, software, and hardware techniques for high-performance machine learning, with a focus on relaxed-consistency variants of stochastic algorithms such as asynchronous and low-precision stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and Markov chain Monte Carlo.

Deborah Estrin is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech in New York City where she founded the Jacobs Institute’s Health Tech Hub. She holds The Robert V. Tishman Founder’s Chair, serves as an Associate Dean, and is a part-time Amazon Scholar. Her research interests are at the intersection of user-centric data applications, personalization, and privacy (TEDMED). Estrin co-founded the non-profit startup, Open mHealth and has served on several scientific advisory boards for early stage mobile health startups. Before joining Cornell University Estrin was the Founding Director of the NSF Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS) at UCLA; pioneering the development of mobile and wireless systems to collect and analyze real time data about the physical world. Her honors include: ACM Athena Lecture (2006), Anita Borg Institute’s Women of Vision Award for Innovation (2007), The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2007), The National Academy of Engineering (2009), The IEEE Internet Award (2017), and MacArthur Fellow (2018).

Nate Foster is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University and a Principal Research Engineer at Barefoot Networks. The goal of his research is to develop languages and tools that make it easy for programmers to build secure and reliable systems. His current work focuses on the design and implementation of languages for programming software-defined networks. He received a PhD in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania.

Paul Ginsparg has been Professor of Physics and Information Science at Cornell University since 2001. He received a B.A. in Physics from Harvard University (1977), and a doctorate in theoretical particle physics from Cornell University (1981). He was in the Harvard Society of Fellows (1981-1984), faculty member in the physics department at Harvard University until 1990, and staff member in the theoretical division of Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1990-2001. He has done many things, served on many committees and advisory boards, taught many classes, and received many awards, including American Physical Society Fellow, MacArthur Fellow, Radcliffe Fellow, Simons Fellow, White House Champion of Change, and honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Carla Gomes is a Professor of Computer Science, with joint appointments in Computer Science, Information Science, and the Dyson School, and the director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University. Gomes received a Ph.D. in computer science in the area of artificial intelligence (AI) from the University of Edinburgh. Recently, Gomes has become deeply immersed in research on scientific discovery for a sustainable future and more generally in the new field of Computational Sustainability. Gomes is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Eric L. Grimson is Chancellor for Academic Advancement at MIT, Professor of Computer Science, and the Bernard M. Gordon Professor of Medical Engineering. As Chancellor for Academic Advancement, he represents the Institute to alumni/alumnae, parents and others, and advises the President on issues related to MIT’s Campaign for a Better World. A faculty member since 1984, he previously served as Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and as Chancellor for MIT. In addition to research in computer vision and medical image analysis, Professor Grimson teaches introductory Computer Programming courses, including an online MITx course. In all, he has taught some 15,000 MIT undergraduates and served as the thesis supervisor to almost 50 MIT PhDs. A Fellow of AAAI, of ACM, and of IEEE, he holds a Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) from Dalhousie University and a Doctor of Science (honoris causa) from University of Saskatchewan.

Barbara Grosz is Higgins Research Professor of Natural Sciences in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and a member of the External Faculty of Santa Fe Institute. She has made groundbreaking contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) through her pioneering research in natural language processing and in theories of multi-agent collaboration and their application to human-computer interaction. Her current research explores ways to use models developed in this research to improve health care coordination and science education. She co-founded Harvard’s Embedded Ethics program, which integrates teaching of ethical reasoning into core computer science courses. A member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Philosophical Society, she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a corresponding fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.  She received the 2009 ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award, the 2015 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence, and the 2017 Association for Computational Linguistics Lifetime Achievement Award. She was founding dean of science and then dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and she is known for her role in the establishment and leadership of interdisciplinary institutions and for her contributions to the advancement of women in science. Professor Grosz serves on the boards of several scientific, scholarly and academic institutions.

Nika Haghtalab is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. Her research is on the theoretical aspects of machine learning and algorithmic economics, with a focus on developing a theory for machine learning that accounts for its interactions with people and organizations. Nika received her Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University in 2018. She was a Postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in 2018-2019. Her honors include the CMU School of Computer Science Dissertation award, ACM SIGecom honorable mention dissertation award, Microsoft Research fellowship, Facebook fellowship, IBM fellowship, and Siebel scholarship.

Bharath Hariharan is an assistant professor working on computer vision and machine learning. Before joining Cornell, he was a postdoc working with Ross Girshick and others at Facebook AI Research. I did his PhD at Berkeley with Jitendra Malik.

Daniel Huttenlocher is the inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Huttenlocher helped found Cornell Tech, the digital technology oriented graduate school created by Cornell University in New York City. He has a mix of academic and industry background, having worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and served as CTO of Intelligent Markets. He currently serves as the board chair of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and as a board member of Corning Incorporated and Amazon.com. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan, and master’s and doctorate from MIT.

Steve Jackson is Associate Professor of Information Science and Science and Technology Studies, Chair of Information Science, and Dean at William Keeton House. Trained in the interdisciplinary social sciences, he works on emerging problems in information ethics, law and policy; infrastructure, maintenance and repair in computing systems (including in the global South); and a wide range of projects around computation, collaboration and sustainability in science, music, and the arts.

Farnam Jahanian is the 10th president of Carnegie Mellon University, where he previously served as provost and also as vice president for research. Prior to CMU, Jahanian led the National Science Foundation Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) and spent 21 years at the University of Michigan. He also co-founded the internet security company Arbor Networks in 2001. Dr. Jahanian is chair of the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board and sits on the board of the National Center for Women and Information Technology and on the executive committee of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness. He is co-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global University Leaders Forum (GULF).

Wendy Ju is an Assistant Professor of Information Science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech. Previously, Prof. Ju was Executive Director at the Center for Design Research at Stanford University, Associate Professor in the Design MFA program at California College of the Arts. Her work in the areas of automated vehicle interfaces and human robot interaction highlights the ways that interactive devices can communicate and engage people without interrupting or intruding. Prof. Ju has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. She has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, and a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015.

Jofish Kaye is a Principal Research Scientist at Mozilla in the Emerging Technologies team. His research explores the social, cultural, and technological effects of technology on people, and how people’s decisions, needs, and behaviors can change and improve those technologies. He manages a team focusing on open voice tools and technologies and runs the Mozilla Research Grants program. He received his Ph.D in Information Science from Cornell University in 2008.

Rene Kizilcec is an Assistant Professor in Computing and Information Science at Cornell University, where he directs the Future of Learning Lab. His research is on the impact of digital technologies in formal and informal learning contexts and scalable interventions to broaden participation, raise academic performance, and reduce achievement gaps. Kizilcec received a BA in Philosophy and Economics from University College London, and an MSc in Statistics and PhD in Communication from Stanford, with a thesis on designing psychologically welcoming online learning environments.

Jon is a professor at Cornell University. His research focuses on the interaction of algorithms and networks and the roles they play in large-scale social and information systems. My work has been supported by an NSF Career Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Simons Investigator Award, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and grants from Facebook, Google, Yahoo, the MacArthur Foundation, the ARO, and the NSF. I am a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lillian Lee (Professor; AAAI, ACL, and ACM Fellow) works on NLP and computational social science. She received one of three inaugural awards for the Test of Time Paper on Computational Linguistics, best paper awards at NAACL 2004 (with Regina Barzilay) and the IJCAI 2016 NLP meets Journalism workshop (with Liye Fu and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil). Her co-authored work has been mentioned in The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, and NBC’s The Today Show, and one of her co-authored papers was publicly called “boring” by YouTubers Rhett and Link in a video viewed 2.6 million times.

Karen Levy is an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, and associate member of the faculty of Cornell Law School. She researches how law and technology interact to regulate social life, with particular focus on social and organizational aspects of surveillance. Much of Dr. Levy’s research analyzes the uses of monitoring for social control in various contexts, from long-haul trucking to intimate relationships. She is also interested in how data collection uniquely impacts, and is contested by, marginalized populations. Dr. Levy is also a fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute in New York City. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University and a J.D. from Indiana University Maurer School of Law. Dr. Levy previously served as a law clerk in the United States Federal Courts.

Farhad Manjoo became an opinion columnist for The New York Times in 2018. Before that, he wrote The Times’ State of the Art column, covering the technology industry’s efforts to swallow up the world. Manjoo has also written for Slate, Salon, Fast Company and The Wall Street Journal. To his chagrin, his 2008 book, “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact World,” accurately predicted our modern age of tech-abetted echo chambers and “alternative facts.” Manjoo was born in South Africa and emigrated with his family to Southern California in the late 1980s. He lives in Northern California with his wife and two children.

Greg Morrisett is the Jack and Rilla Neafsey Dean and Vice Provost of Cornell Tech and a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Cornell University. As Dean, he has overall responsibility for the campus, including the academic quality and direction of the Cornell Tech degree programs and research. Working with both internal and external stakeholders, he is developing approaches for working with companies, nonprofits, government agencies and early stage investors, as well as overseeing the faculty recruitment and entrepreneurial initiatives of the campus. Prior to joining Cornell Tech, Morrisett was Dean of Computing and Information Science (CIS) at Cornell University from 2015-2019. Previously, he held the Allen B. Cutting chair in Computer Science at Harvard University from 2004-2015 where he also served as Associate Dean for Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Before Harvard, Morrisett spent eight years on the faculty of Cornell’s Computer Science Department. Morrisett’s research focuses on the application of programming language technology for building secure, reliable, and high-performance software systems. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Richmond and both his Master’s and Doctorate degrees from Carnegie Mellon University.

Radha Narayan is currently a Product Manager at Google, Inc. She joined Google as a software engineer in 2005 from Cornell University, where she received a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Philosophy. She has been involved in several projects including the redesign of Google Maps, the infrastructure behind Google Search, and now works on improving the health of Android devices. She has moved across a few roles including program management, people management and product management. She is one of the people behind Google’s first Pride easter eggs, and runs a scholarship at her alma mater for women in engineering. She grew up in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Canada, and is a published author of short fiction. Her first novel came out in May 2018. Her first novel, “Driving by Starlight” was published in 2018 under her pen-name, Anat Deracine.

Dr. Ning obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Fudan University, China, and a Ph.D degree in Biostatistics from the Johns Hopkins University.  The theme of his research is to develop statistical methods and theory to quantify the uncertainty (confidence interval and hypothesis test) in large and complex data sets. He enjoys working at the interface of mathematical statistics, machine learning and stochastic optimization. He is also interested in applied projects in genomics, neuroscience, epidemiology and clinical trials.

Martha E. Pollack is the fourteenth president of Cornell University and professor of computer science, information science, and linguistics. She took office on April 17, 2017. President Pollack is committed to building upon Cornell’s academic distinction and unique strengths as an Ivy League and land-grant university, while also sustaining and enhancing its culture of “educational verve” by investing in new, evidence-based approaches to teaching and learning. She sees Cornell’s founding commitment to diversity and equity as central to its identity and its success, and has engaged the entire university in the work of building an open, inclusive community whose members communicate effectively across difference. In her leadership of Cornell’s many units and campuses, she works to cultivate productive and meaningful synergies across disciplines and geographies, realizing a vision of “One Cornell” that capitalizes on the complementary strengths of our urban and rural identities. Pollack was previously provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Michigan, where she was also professor of computer science and information. An expert in artificial intelligence with a research focus on natural-language processing, automated planning, and the design of assistive technology for people with cognitive impairment, she is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. She earned a bachelor’s degree in linguistics at Dartmouth College and an M.S. and Ph.D. in computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hunter R. Rawlings III is president emeritus of Cornell University and former president of the Association of American Universities. A professor of classics and history, Rawlings served as president of the University of Iowa for seven years before leading Cornell. As the university’s tenth president (1995–2003), he was noted for his commitment to need-blind admissions, focus on undergraduate academics and campus life, and new initiatives for the life sciences and genomics as well as support for the humanities. At the conclusion of his presidency, he returned to full-time teaching in Cornell’s classics and history departments until called upon to serve as interim president in 2005–2006, a role he reprised in 2016–2017. As president of the AAU—an association of leading research universities in the United States and Canada—from 2011 to 2016, Rawlings was a national spokesperson for higher education, leading the AAU’s advocacy on priorities such as funding for research, research policy issues, and graduate and undergraduate education. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a graduate of Haverford College and earned a PhD in classics from Princeton University.

Christopher (Chris) Ré is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University who is affiliated with the Statistical Machine Learning Group, Pervasive Parallelism Lab, and Stanford AI Lab. His work’s goal is to enable users and developers to build applications that more deeply understand and exploit data. His contributions span database theory, database systems, and machine learning, and his work has won best paper at a premier venue in each area, respectively, at PODS 2012, SIGMOD 2014, and ICML 2016. In addition, work from his group has been incorporated into major scientific and humanitarian efforts, including the IceCube neutrino detector, PaleoDeepDive and MEMEX in the fight against human trafficking, and into products from many major web and enterprise companies. He cofounded a company, based on his research, that was acquired by Apple in 2017. More recently, he cofounded SambaNova systems based, in part, on his work on accelerating machine learning. He received a SIGMOD Dissertation Award in 2010, an NSF CAREER Award in 2011, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship in 2013, a Moore Data Driven Investigator Award in 2014, the VLDB early Career Award in 2015, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2015, and an Okawa Research Grant in 2016.

Tim Roughgarden is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University. Prior to joining Columbia, he spent 15 years on the computer science faculty at Stanford, following a PhD in 2002 at Cornell and a postdoc at UC Berkeley. He works on the boundary of computer science and economics, and on the design, analysis, applications, and limitations of algorithms.

Jeff Rzeszotarski is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Science at Cornell University. His work focuses on the intersection of human-computer interaction and data science, investigating how technology can help individuals make sense of data and data-driven models through new visualizations and interactions. Rzeszotarski received a BA in Computer Science from Carleton College. He received his MSc and PhD in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, with a dissertation focusing on usable tools for exploring complex data.

Adrian Sampson is an assistant professor in the computer science department at Cornell. He works on programming languages, computer architecture, and on rethinking the abstractions between hardware and software. He joinedCornell in 2016 after graduating from the University of Washington and spending a year at Microsoft Research.

Fred B. Schneider is Samuel B. Eckert Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He joined Cornell’s faculty in Fall 1978 and served as department chair from 2014-2018, having completed a Ph.D. at Stony Brook University and a B.S. in Engineering at Cornell in 1975.  Schneider’s research has focused on various aspects of trustworthy systems — systems that will perform as expected, despite failures and attacks.

Elaine Shi is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Cornell. Her research interests include cryptography, algorithms, distributed systems, foundations of blockchain, security, and programming languages. She co-authored the first peer-reviewed paper on decentralized cryptocurrencies and later the first peer-reviewed paper on decentralized smart contracts. She is a recipient of the Packard Fellowship, the Sloan Fellowship, the ONR YIP award, the NSA Best Scientific Paper Award, and various best paper awards.

Karthik Sridharan is an Assistant Professor at the computer science department in Cornell University. His research includes machine learning, online and sequential prediction and optimization. He received his PhD at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago and was a Postdoctoral research scholar at University of Pennsylvania before starting as a faculty at Cornell University. He has received the NSF CAREER award, a Sloan Fellowship.

Ross Tate is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Cornell University and the Director of the Single Open Intermediate Language Initiative. His research combines theoretical foundations with studies of programmer behavior to develop language designs that ascribe to both academic and industrial principles. He collaborates with major languages such as Kotlin, WebAssembly, Julia, Ceylon, and Java to inform his work from practice and incorporate his work into practice. Due to his research contributions and industry impact, he was awarded the Dahl Nygaard Junior Prize in 2017.

Éva Tardos is a Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science and Associate Dean for Diversity and Inclusion for Computing in Information Sciences at Cornell University. She was department chair 2006-2010. She received her PhD from Eötvös University in Budapest. She joined the faculty at Cornell in 1989. Tardos’s research interest is algorithms and game theory.  She has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is the recipient of a number of awards including the IEEE von Neumann Medal in 2019.

Immanuel Trummer is assistant professor for computer science at Cornell University. His research covers various aspects of large-scale data management with the goal of making data analysis more efficient and more user-friendly. His publications were selected for “Best of VLDB”, for the ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award, and for publication in CACM as CACM Research Highlight. He is a recipient of the Google Faculty Research Award and alumnus of the German National Academic Foundation.

Hakim Weatherspoon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University and Associate Director for Cornell’s Initiative for Digital Agriculture (CIDA). His research interests cover various aspects of fault-tolerance, reliability, security, and performance of internet-scale data systems such as cloud and distributed systems.  Weatherspoon received his Bachelors from the University of Washington and PhD from University of California, Berkeley. Weatherspoon has received awards for his many contributions, including the University of Washington, Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, Alumni Achievement Award;  Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; National Science Foundation CAREER Award; and a Kavli Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences. He serves as Vice President of the USENIX Board of Directors and serves on the Steering Committee for the ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing. Weatherspoon has also been recognized for his work to promote diversity, earning Cornell’s Zellman Warhaft Commitment to Diversity Award.  Since 2011, he has organized the annual SoNIC Summer Research Workshop to help prepare between students from underrepresented groups to pursue their Ph.D. in computer science.

Cheng Zhang is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Information Science at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in the School of Interactive Computing (IC) at Georgia Institute of Technology, advised by Gregory Abowd (IC) and Omer Inan (ECE). His research focuses on enabling the seamless exchange of information among humans, computers, and the environment by building novel sensing and machine learning systems. His Ph.D. thesis won the Doctoral Dissertation Award in College of Computing at Georgia Tech and was nominated for ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. It presents ten different novel input techniques for wearables, some leveraging commodity devices, while others incorporate new hardware. His work blends an understanding of signal propagation on and around the body with, when necessary, appropriate machine learning techniques. His work has resulted in over a dozen publications in top-tier conferences and journals in the field of Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing (including two best paper awards), as well as over six pending U.S. and international patents. His work has attracted the attention of various media outlets, including DigitalTrends, ScienceDaily, ZDNet, New Scientist, RT, TechRadar, Phys.org, Yahoo News, and MSN News.