Tom Potok, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Dr. Thomas E. Potok is the founder and leader of the Computational Data Analytics Group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The CDA group was formed in 2000, and currently has 30 research staff and an annual budget of $10M. He is also a joint faculty member and the Associate Director of the Center for Intelligent Systems and Machine Learning (CISML) at University of Tennessee in the Computer Science department, and a joint faculty member in the Computer Engineering Department at Duke University. He is currently a principle investigator on a number of projects involving large-scale data analytics, and is the co-inventor of the Piranha text analysis software system that won an R&D 100 Award in 2007 (Oscars of Invention), and a con-inventor of the DTHSTR content-based recommender system that won an R&D 100 Award in 2013. In 2012 he co-founded and is the chief technology officer of the Global Security Information Analysts (GSIA) company formed to commercializing the Piranha and DTHSTR software. Prior to this he worked for 14 years at IBM’s Software Solutions Laboratory in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, where he held a number of positions and conducted research in software engineering productivity. He has a BS, MS, and Ph.D. in Computer Engineering all from North Carolina State University. He has published 140+ papers; received 13 issued patents, and serves on a number of journal editorial boards, and conference organizing and program committees.

Lawrence Carin, Duke University

Lawrence Carin earned the BS, MS, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1985, 1986, and 1989, respectively. In 1989 he joined the Electrical Engineering Department at Polytechnic University (Brooklyn) as an Assistant Professor, and became an Associate Professor there in 1994. In September 1995 he joined the Electrical Engineering Department at Duke University, where he is now a Professor, and Vice Provost for Research. From 2003-2014 he held the William H. Younger Distinguished Professorship, and he was ECE Department Chair from 2011-2014. Dr Carin's early research was in the area of electromagentics and sensing, and over the last 15 years his research has moved to applied statistics and machine learning. He has recently served on the Program Committee for the following machine learning conferences: International Conf. on Machine Learning (ICML), Neural and Information Processing Systems (NIPS), Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), and Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI). He was previously an Associate Editor (AE) of the IEEE Trans. on Antennas and Propagation, the IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing, and the SIAM J. of Imaging Science. He is currently an AE for the J. of Machine Learning Research. He is an IEEE Fellow.

Yiran Chen, Duke University

Yiran Chen received B.S and M.S. from Tsinghua University and Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2005. After five years in industry, he joined University of Pittsburgh in 2010 as Assistant Professor and then promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2014, held Bicentennial Alumni Faculty Fellow. He now is a tenured Associate Professor of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University and serving as the director of NSF Industry–University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) for Alternative Sustainable and Intelligent Computing (ASIC) and co-director of Duke Center for Evolutionary Intelligence (CEI), focusing on the research of new memory and storage systems, machine learning and neuromorphic computing, and mobile computing systems. Dr. Chen has published one book and more than 350 technical publications and has been granted 93 US patents. He serves or served the associate editor of several IEEE and ACM transactions/journals and served on the technical and organization committees of more than 50 international conferences. He received 6 best paper awards and 12 best paper nominations from international conferences. He is the recipient of NSF CAREER award and ACM SIGDA outstanding new faculty award. He is the Fellow of IEEE and Distinguished Member of ACM, a distinguished lecturer of IEEE CEDA, and the recipient of the Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers.

Ramakrishnan(Ramki) Kannan, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Generally, people know me as Ramki. I am a Computational Data Scientist in Oak Ridge National Laboratory focusing on large scale data mining and machine learning algorithms on HPC systems and modern architectures with applications from scientific domain and many different internet services. I received my Ph.D in Computer Science from College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology(GaTech) advised by Prof. Haesun Park. Prior to Ph.D., I worked on Data Analytics group at IBM TJ Watson Research Center and was an IBM Master Inventor. Under the advise of Prof. Narahari, I graduated from Indian Institute of Science with M.Sc (Engg). For more information visit https://ramkikannan.github.io