Lynne Parker, Casey Greene, Daniel Acuña, Kentaro Toyama & Mark Finlayson

Lynne E. Parker, a native Knoxvillian, is Associate Vice Chancellor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK), and Director of the AI Tennessee Initiative, which is positioning the University and the state of Tennessee as a national and global leader in the data-intensive knowledge economy. Prior to this role, she led national artificial intelligence (AI) policy efforts for four years (2018-2022) in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, serving as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Founding Director of the National AI Initiative Office, and Assistant Director for AI. She also served as co-chair of the Congressionally-directed National AI Research Resource Task Force, which is working to democratize access to the computational and data infrastructure needed for AI research. She served for two years (2015-2016) at the National Science Foundation as Division Director for Information and Intelligent Systems. In these roles across three Administrations, she led the development of numerous landmark national AI policies bolstering research, governance, education and workforce training, international engagement, and the Federal use of AI. Dr. Parker joined the UTK faculty in 2002 and is an expert on distributed and intelligent robot systems, human-robot interaction, and AI, having published extensively in these and related areas. She previously worked for several years as a Distinguished Research and Development Staff Member and Group Leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, researching multi-robot and human-robot systems. Dr. Parker has served on many government advisory boards, including the National Academies' Intelligence Science and Technology Experts Group (ISTEG), National Research Council's (NRC) committee on persistent surveillance for the counter-IED mission, NRC Panel for Review of the Engineering Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NRC Panel on Mechanical Science and Engineering at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), NRC Advisory Panel on Information Science at ARL, NRC Advisory Panel on Air and Ground Vehicle Technology at ARL, and NRC Advisory Panel on Armor and Armaments at ARL. Dr. Parker was also a member of the 2004-2005 class of the Defense Science Study Group (DSSG). She has received numerous awards for research, teaching, and service, including the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) and the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Robotics and Automation Society’s George Saridis Leadership Award in Robotics and Automation. She is a Fellow of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence), AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), and IEEE; and a Distinguished Member of ACM (Association for Computing Machinery). Dr. Parker earned a B.S. from Tennessee Technological University, an M.S. from the University of Tennessee, and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in computer science. Casey is the Chair of and a Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics and the founding Director of the Center for Health AI. His lab develops machine learning methods that integrate distinct large-scale datasets to extract the rich and intrinsic information embedded in such integrated data. This approach reveals underlying principles of an organism’s genetics, its environment, and its response to that environment. Extracting this key contextual information reveals where the data’s context doesn’t fit existing models and raises the questions that a complete collection of publicly available data indicates researchers should be asking. In addition to developing deep learning methods for extracting context, a core mission of his lab is bringing these capabilities into every molecular biology lab through open, transparent science conducted by a diverse team of researchers. Before starting the Integrative Genomics Lab in 2012, Casey earned his Ph.D. for his study of gene-gene interactions in the field of computational genetics from Dartmouth College in 2009 and moved to the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University where he worked as a postdoctoral fellow from 2009-2012. The overarching theme of his work has been the development and evaluation of methods that acknowledge the emergent complexity of biological systems. Daniel Acuña is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He leads the Science of Science and Computational Discovery Lab. He works in science of science, a subfield of computational social science, and A.I. for science. He writes papers and builds web-based software tools to accelerate knowledge discovery. Daniel’s research aims to understand historical relationships, mechanisms, and optimization opportunities of knowledge production. Daniel harnesses vast datasets about publications and citations and applies Machine Learning and A.I. to uncover rules that make publication, collaboration, and funding decisions more successful. Recently, he has been interested in biases in artificial intelligence and developing methods for detecting them. In addition, he has created tools to improve literature search, peer review, and detect scientific fraud. He has been funded by NSF, DDHS, Sloan Foundation, and DARPA through the SCORE project, and his work has been featured in Nature News, Nature Podcast, The Chronicle of Higher Education, NPR, and the Scientist. In addition to his research, Daniel enjoys building communities around science of science and research integrity. He co-organizes the Science of Science Summer School (S4), the Computational Research Integrity (CRI-CONF) conference, and the Computational Research Integrity competitions. In addition, he is part of the ACM’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) council, contributing to the social justice initiative on publications, awards, and peer review. Before joining Syracuse University, Acuña studied a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Minnesota - Twin Cities and was a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. During his graduate studies, he received a NIH Neuro-physical-computational Sciences (NPCS) Graduate Training Fellowship, NIPS Travel Award, and a CONICYT-World Bank Fellowship. Daniel was born in Santiago, Chile, where he attended the University of Santiago. Kentaro Toyama is W.K. Kellogg Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, and author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. In his research, Kentaro studies social change and international development, especially as it is impacted by digital technology. Recent projects include an application of critical race theory to human-computer interaction, digital storytelling to support global maternal health, and a study of technology use by undocumented US immigrants. Based on his research, Kentaro promotes the theory that for the most part, technology amplifies underlying human forces -- improving things where individuals and institutions are well-intentioned and capable, but having little or negative impact where human forces are indifferent, dysfunctional, or corrupt. Often, technology amplifies the impact of good, bad, left, right, optimistic, and pessimistic human inclinations simultaneously, leading to society's deeply ambivalent relationship with technology. Amplification offers a more balanced, but often predictive, alternative to theories that suggest that technology's impact on society is always good, or always bad, or always too complex to capture concisely. Previously, Kentaro was a researcher at UC Berkeley and assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. At MSR India, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary research to understand how the world's poorer communities interact with electronic technology and to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. The award-winning group is known for projects such as MultiPoint, Text-Free User Interfaces, and Digital Green. Kentaro co-founded the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) to provide a global platform for rigorous academic research in this field. From 2012 through 2020, he was co-editor-in-chief of the journal Information Technologies and International Development. Prior to his time in India, Kentaro did computer vision and multimedia research at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA and Cambridge, UK, and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Kentaro graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics. He was born in Tokyo, raised in both Japan and the United States, and now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I am the Eminent Scholar Chaired Associate Professor of Computer Science in FIU's Knight Foundation School of Computing and Information Sciences. Research Interests I study the science of narrative, including understanding the relationship between narrative, cognition, and culture, developing new methods and techniques for investigating questions related to language and narrative, and endowing machines with the ability to understand and use narratives for a variety of applications. Key problems I have addressed so far include: extracting high-level narrative structure from sets of stories; techniques for discourse processing; temporal information extraction; general natural language processing; the creation, annotation, and manipulation of language resources; and collecting richly annotated corpora of stories. My research intersects computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computational social science, and the digital humanities. Brief Bio I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 2012 under the supervision of Professor Patrick H. Winston. Following that, I was a Research Scientist in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory for 2½ years. I received my S.M. in 2001 from MIT, and the B.S. in 1998 from the University of Michigan, both in Electrical Engineering. I received promotion and tenure in Summer of 2020. While at FIU my work has been funded by NSF, NIH, ONR, DARPA, DHS, and IBM.