Joleen Liang

Squirrel AI

Bio: Joleen Liang is the co-founder of Squirrel AI Learning and a distinguished academic with a Ph.D. in Intelligent Science and Systems. She has significantly contributed to the fields of AI and adaptive learning. As a visiting professor at The Research Institute for Innovation and Technology in Education (UNIR iTED), she focuses on personalized learning and the application of AI in education. Joleen’s company Squirrel AI Learning recently announced the World’s 1st All-disciplined Large Adaptive Model (LAM) platform which integrates adaptive learning and large model. She has led the promotion of smart education public school project and AI Intelligent hardware, which has served 60,000+ full-time primary and secondary schools nationwide. The company Squirrel AI has brought AI intelligent learning systems/hardwares to more than 20 million users. Joleen has spoken at World Summit AI together with Yoshua Bengio and Stefania Giannini, Assistant Director General for Education, UNESCO. Joleen was also invited to speak at IJCAI, ACM KDD, ACM UMAP, Tsinghua University, New York University Shanghai, Harvard University Education Dept., Slush, TechCrunch, UBS Investor Conference, SFT, Global Smart Education Summit, BETT and other domestic and international summits, and interviewed by Bloomberg and other media.

In 2020, Joleen and Squirrel AI were honored ‘AI Education Innovation Award’ by UNESCO. Squirrel AI’s case study in online learning was published in UNESCO reports.

Nitesh V. Chawla

University of Notre Dame

Bio: Nitesh V. Chawla is the Frank M. Freimann Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He is the Founding Director of the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society.  He also holds concurrent faculty appointments in the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Science and the Department of Information, Technology, Analytics and Operations in the College of Business.

He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Chawla is an expert in artificial intelligence, data science, and network science, and is motivated by the question of how technology can advance the common good through interdisciplinary research. As such, his research is not only at the frontier of fundamental methods and algorithms but is also making interdisciplinary and translational advances for societal impact.

Chawla is the recipient of multiple awards for research and teaching innovation including Outstanding Teacher Awards at Notre Dame, a National Academy of Engineers New Faculty Fellowship, and a number of best paper awards and nominations. He also is the recipient of the 2015 IEEE CIS Outstanding Early Career Award; the IBM Watson Faculty Award; the IBM Big Data and Analytics Faculty Award; and the 1st Source Bank Technology Commercialization Award.

In recognition of the societal and community driven impact of his research, Chawla was recognized with the Rodney F. Ganey Award and Michiana 40 under 40 honor.  

George Karypis

Amazon/University of Minnesota

Bio: George Karypis is a Senior Principal Scientist at AWS AI and a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and William Norris Chair in Large Scale Computing at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Minnesota. His research interests span the areas of data mining, machine learning, high performance computing, information retrieval, collaborative filtering, bioinformatics, cheminformatics, and scientific computing. His research has resulted in the development of software libraries for serial and parallel graph partitioning (METIS and ParMETIS), hypergraph partitioning (hMETIS), for parallel Cholesky factorization (PSPASES), for collaborative filtering-based recommendation algorithms (SUGGEST), clustering high dimensional datasets (CLUTO), finding frequent patterns in diverse datasets (PAFI), and for protein secondary structure prediction (YASSPP). He has coauthored over 350 papers on these topics and two books (“Introduction to Protein Structure Prediction: Methods and Algorithms” (Wiley, 2010) and “Introduction to Parallel Computing” (Publ. Addison Wesley, 2003, 2nd edition)). He is serving on the program committees of many conferences and workshops on these topics, and on the editorial boards of the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Social Network Analysis and Data Mining Journal, International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics, the journal on Current Proteomics, Advances in Bioinformatics, and Biomedicine and Biotechnology. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

EAI, Northeastern University/Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Bio: Ricardo Baeza-Yates is currently Director of Research at the Institute for Experiential AI of Northeastern University, Silicon Valley campus, since January 2021. He is also a member of the DATA Lab at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences. The rest of the time he does consulting for tech startups, companies and non-profit international institutions, particularly in responsible AI.

He is actively involved as expert in many initiatives, committees or advisory boards related to Responsible AI all around the world: Global AI Ethics Consortium, Global Partnership on AI, IADB’s fAIr LAC Initiative (Latin America and the Caribbean), and ACM’s US Technology Policy Committee. He is also a co-founder of OptIA in Chile, a NGO devoted to algorithmic transparency and inclusion, and member of the editorial committee of the new AI and Ethics Journal where he co-authored an article highlighting the importance of research freedom on AI ethics. Between 2019 and 2023 he was a member of Spain’s Council of AI.

Between 2016 and 2020 he was CTO of NTENT, a search technology company based in Carlsbad, California. Previously, he was VP of Research at Yahoo Labs, based in Barcelona, Spain, and later in Sunnyvale, California, from January 2006 to February 2016. Between 2008 and 2012 he also supervised Yahoo Labs Haifa and between 2012 and 2014 Yahoo Labs London. Until 2005 he was the director of the Center for Web Research at the Department of Computer Science of the Engineering School  of the University of Chile; and ICREA Professor and founder of the Web Science and Social Computing Research Group (formerly Web Research Group) at the Dept. of Information and Communication Technologies of Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. He maintains ties with both mentioned universities as a part-time professor. Finally, he is also an adjunct professor at the CS department of the University of Waterloo, Canada.  

His research interests includes algorithms and data structures, information retrieval, web search and data mining, and data science and visualization.

He is ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow.