Richard Simmons is currently a Principal Research Engineer and Fellow at Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) where he directs cross-cutting energy projects with an emphasis on clean electric power, vehicle efficiency and alternative fuels. Simmons is also director of the Energy Policy and Innovation Center (EPICenter) whose objective is to perform research and outreach in energy policy and innovation with a distinctively regional perspective. He is also a part-time instructor in Georgia Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, with a specialization in design, mechatronics and thermal systems. 

Simmons received his BS from Georgia Tech, and MS and Ph.D. from Purdue, all in Mechanical Engineering. He is a licensed professional engineer (PE) with more than 20 years of RD&D experience in automotive, advanced materials, and alternative energy and fuels. 

From 2009 to 2012, he served a prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science S&T (Science and Technology) Policy Fellowship at the U.S. Department of State, providing technical analysis on international policy issues related to renewable energy. He has recently authored numerous publications including an open-access eBook entitled “Understanding the Global Energy Crisis” (Purdue Press, 2014), several book chapters and journal articles related to advanced energy technologies, transportation energy technology, and future energy policy strategies.

My current research involves the modeling of certain types of human activity that exhibit regular spatio- and/or temporal patterns. As a case study, we have generally focused on various types of criminal behavior, since there are clear patterns in this activity and we have access to relatively large amounts of data. A large portion of this work aims to model the formation and dynamics of crime "hotspots" - spatio-temporal regions of increased criminal activity. Working with data provided by the Los Angeles and Long Beach police departments, we have developed methods of measuring the repeat and near-repeat criminal events that are the hallmarks of hotspot formation. We have also constructed a family of discrete models that allow for such patterns to develop from natural criminal behavior, and have derived continuum approximations of these discrete models. Some output from one of many simulations (right) illustrates this finding, with "hot" areas in red and "cold" areas in purple. 

In addition to the work on crime hotspots, this overarching project has also included: more accurate predictions of when and where crimes will occur, based on self-exciting point process models borrowed from seismology; the study of gang territoriality, modeled via diffusive Lotka-Volterra equations; gang retaliatory violence, and how the police may be able to solve such crimes using constrained optimization; the evolution of gang rivalry networks in the presence of retaliation and third-party effects; game theoretic models for the levels of both crime and cooperation with the authorities in society; and new methods for finding the "anchor points" of criminals given the locations of crimes they committed, based on models inspired by animal foraging.

Whether we’re driving a car, cooking dinner, performing a psychology experiment, or even watching television, we’re performing goal-directed behavior. We must keep track of our current goal (e.g., to cook dinner), so that we do not execute responses inappropriate for the present situation (e.g., sitting down to watch television). Yet, we must also flexibly adapt our goals to changing situations. For example, we must override our “cooking” goal with an “answering” one when we hear the doorbell ring. My research focuses on the mental processes required to carry out these and other types of goal-directed behavior.

A complicated set of mental processes are involved in behaviors like these. In addition to maintaining and updating our goals, we must attend to relevant stimuli, store relevant information in memory, and select and execute appropriate responses. What is the nature of these processes? How do they interact? What are their limitations? How do they change with training? And what are the neural mechanisms underlying them? These are the types of questions I investigate using a variety of experimental techniques: including behavioral testing, functional neuroimaging, and magnetic stimulation.

Dr. Emily D. Sanders is an Assistant Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. She obtained her Ph.D. at Georgia Tech in 2021, where she developed new topology optimization methods for design of tension-only cable nets, elastostatic cloaking devices, and multiscale structures and components. Dr. Sanders hold a bachelor’s degree from Bucknell University and a master’s degree from Stanford University.

Matt works with Georgia Tech researchers and students, along with industry partners in the creation of innovative mobile and converged applications and services. He is also the Associate Director, and co-founder, of the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center, a unique research center supporting industry and student engagement through research and operational projects; and the wireless services manager for Georgia Tech in the Office of Information Technology. Matt is a principal in the annual Convergence Innovation Competition, now in its ninth year, which provides industry sponsors an opportunity to engage students in wide ranging categories which they define and judge. Matt is also responsible for The GT Journey project which includes GT mobile, an HTML5 based portal for mobile, desktop, and kiosks; and GT DevHub where any member of the campus community can access campus IT services and contribute content, meta-data, and the applications themselves.

Susan Ryan is a member of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.

Jarek Rossignac is Professor of Computing at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on the design, representation, simplification, compression, analysis and visualization of complex 3D shapes and animations. Before joining Georgia Tech in 1996 as the Director of the GVU Center, he was the Visualization Strategist and Senior Manager at IBM Research. He holds a Ph.D. in E.E. from the University of Rochester, a Diplôme d'Ingénieur ENSEM, and a Maîtrise in M.E. from the University of Nancy, France. He holds 26 patents and published 154 peer-reviewed articles (including 4 in ACM SIGGRAPH, 6 in the ACM Transactions on Graphics, and 13 in the ACM Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling) for which he received 23 Awards and over 7900 citations, yielding an h-index of 48. He created the ACM Symposia on Solid Modeling, chaired 20 conferences and 6 international program committees (including Eurographics), delivered over 30 Distinguished or Invited Lectures and Keynotes, organized and delivered numerous short courses (including 8 at SIGGRAPH) and served on the editorial boards of 7 professional journals and on 82 Technical Program committees (including SIGGRAPH and several other ACM conferences). He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the GMOD (Graphical Models) journal 2010-13. Currently he is the Director of the NSF Aquatic Propulsion Lab (APL). He is a Senior Member of the ACM and a Fellow of the Eurographics association.