Thad Starner is a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Interactive Computing. Thad was perhaps the first to integrate a wearable computer into his everyday life as an intelligent personal assistant. Starner's work as a Ph.D. student would help found the field of Wearable Computing. His group's prototypes and patents on mobile MP3 players, mobile instant messaging and e-mail, gesture-based interfaces, and mobile context-based search foreshadowed now commonplace devices and services. Thad has authored over 100 scientific publications with over 100 co-authors on mobile Human Computer Interaction (HCI), pattern discovery, human power generation for mobile devices, and gesture recognition, and he is a founder and current co-chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems. His work is discussed in public forums such as CNN, NPR, the BBC, CBS's 60 Minutes, The New York Times, Nikkei Science, The London Independent, The Bangkok Post, and The Wall Street Journal.

Agata Rozga is a psychologist with expertise and 16 years of experience forging a new interdisciplinary research area at the intersection of computing and psychology called computational behavioral science. The research vision is to transform the measurement and understanding of long-term, health-related behavioral trends by leveraging advances in sensing, wearable and mobile technologies, and computational analysis methods. The goal is to develop tools that can lead to better detection and monitoring of health-related trends in everyday settings. 

One thrust of Dr. Rozga’s research has focused on understanding early trajectories and predictors of social communication in children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In her most recent work, she is applying novel computational analysis methods to longitudinal measures of communication to identify different pathways to language in autism, including failure to acquire spoken language by age 5. 

Dr. Rozga’s research has recently expanded to include a thrust focused on Aging and Mild Cognitive Impairment, with an eye toward developing novel, AI-based systems to monitor cognitive and functional decline during everyday activities. A related thrust focuses on developing and evaluating situated AI-based interactive supports to help older adults maintain independence and quality of life 

Dr. Rozga serves as the Director of Translational Research for the Georgia Tech-led NSF National AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING). She previously served as Programs and Research Director for the Technology Core of the Cognitive Empowerment Program at the Emory Brain-Health Center, and as Head of Product for Diligent Robotics. 

Jessica Roberts is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at GT with a PhD in the Learning Sciences, specializing in geospatial analysis and visualization in informal learning. As director of the Technology-Integrated Learning Environments (TILEs) Lab at Georgia Tech, her research explores technology-mediated social learning experiences in environments such as museums and citizen science. She is a former middle school teacher and a Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Faculty Fellow. Her work on the design of interactive learning technologies has been exhibited at venues such as the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and the New York Hall of Science. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, Dr. Roberts conducted postdoctoral research at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and the Tidal Lab at Northwestern University.

Mark Riedl is a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing and director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab. Mark's research focuses on the intersection of artificial intelligence, virtual worlds, and storytelling. The principle research question Mark addresses through his research is: how can intelligent computational systems reason about and autonomously create engaging experiences for users of virtual worlds and computer games. Mark's primary research contributions are in the area of artificial intelligence approaches to automated story generation and interactive storytelling for entertainment, education, and training. Narrative is a cognitive tool used by humans for communication and sense-making. The goal of my narrative intelligence research is to discover new computational algorithms and models that can facilitate the development of intelligent computer systems that can reason about narrative in order to be better communicators, entertainers, and educators. Additionally, Mark has explored the following research topics: virtual cinematography in 3D virtual worlds; player modeling; procedural generation of computer game content; computational creativity; human creativity support; intelligent virtual characters; mixed-initiative problem solving; and discourse generation. Mark earned a Ph.D. degree in 2004 from North Carolina State University. From 2004-2007, Mark was a Research Scientist at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies where he researched and developed interactive, narrative-based training systems. Mark joined the Georgia Tech College of Computing in 2007 where he continues to study artificial intelligence approaches to story generation, interactive narratives, and adaptive computer games. His research is supported by the NSF, DARPA, the U.S. Army, Google, and Disney. Mark was the recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award and an NSF CAREER Award.

Dr. Rehg's research interests include computer vision, computer graphics, machine learning, robotics, and distributed computing. He co-directs the Computational Perception Laboratory (CPL) and is affiliated with the GVU Center, Aware Home Research Institute, and the Center for Experimental Research in Computer Science. In past years he has taught "Computer Vision" (CS 4495/7495) and "Introduction to Probabilistic Graphical Models" (CS 8803). He is currently teaching "Pattern Recognition" (CS 4803) and "Computer Graphics" (CS 4451). Dr. Rehg received the 2005 Raytheon Faculty Fellowship Award from the College of Computing. His paper with Ph.D. student Yushi Jing and collaborator Vladimir Pavlovic was the recipient of a Distinguished Student Paper Award at the 2005 International Conference on Machine Learning. Dr. Rehg currently serves on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Computer Vision. He was the Short Courses Chair for the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) in 2005 and the Workshops Chair for ICCV 2003. Dr. Rehg consults for several companies and has served as an expert witness. His research is funded by the NSF, DARPA, Intel Research, Microsoft Research, and the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories.

Note: Rehg recently moved to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as the Founder Professor of Computer Science and Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering.

Harish is an Assistant Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also a core faculty member of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM). His research interests span the areas of robot learning, human-robot interaction, and multi-agent systems. He directs the Structured Techniques for Algorithmic Robotics (STAR) Lab, where he and his team works on structured algorithms that help robots reliably operate and collaborate in unstructured environments alongside humans.

Prof. Pradalier is Associate Professor at GeorgiaTech Lorraine, the French campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology (a.k.a. GeorgiaTech) since September 2012. He defended his “Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches” (Authority to Supervise Research) in 2015 on the topic of “Autonomous Mobile Systems for Long-Term Operations in Spatio-Temporal Environments” at the National Polytechnic Institute of Toulouse (INPT). 

His objective is to extend the activity of the CNRS IRL2958 GT-CNRS towards robotics, leveraging on one side the strong robotic research inside CNRS and on the other side the collaboration potential with the Robotics and Intelligent Machines (RIM) laboratory at GTL. 

At the IRL, he is now the coordinator of the H2020 BugWright2 project, has been involved in H2020 project Flourish and PF7 project Noptilus, as well as in projects on environmental monitoring. 

From November 2007 until December 2012, Dr. Pradalier has been deputy director in the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zürich. In this role, he was the technical coordinator of the V-Charge project (IP, 2010-2014) and also involved in the development of innovative robotic platforms such as autonomous boats for environment monitoring or prototype space rovers funded by the European Space Agency. He is a founding member of the ETH start-up Skybotix, within which he was responsible for software development and integration. 

From 2004 to 2007, Dr. Pradalier was a research scientist at CSIRO Australia. He was then involved in the development of software for autonomous large industrial robots and an autonomous underwater vehicle for the monitoring of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. 

He received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble (INPG) on the topic of autonomous navigation of a small urban mobility system and he is Ingénieur from the National Engineering School for Computer Science and Applied Math in Grenoble (ENSIMAG).

Thomas Ploetz is a computer scientist with expertise and almost 15 years of experience in Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning research (Ph.D. from Bielefeld University, Germany). His research agenda focuses on applied machine learning that is developing systems and innovative sensor data analysis methods for real world applications. Primary application domain for his work is computational behavior analysis, in which he develops methods for automated and objective behavior assessments in naturalistic environments. Main driving functions for his work are "in the wild" deployments and the development of systems and methods that have a real impact on people’s lives.

In 2017, Dr. Ploetz joined the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he works as an associate professor. Prior to this, he was an academic at the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University in Newcastle in Tyne, U.K., where he was a reader (associate professor) for Computational Behavior Analysis affiliated with Open Lab, Newcastle's interdisciplinary center for research in digital technologies.

Visit the Computational Behavior Analysis Lab: cba.gatech.edu.