Didier Contis is the Executive Director of Academic Technology, Innovation, Research Computing for the Office of Information Technology. In his role, Didier provides long-range vision, strategic directions, and support for the research and academic technologies of the Institute by partnering with research and academic entities, and leading and executing the aspects of IT strategy that enable the Institute to achieve its research, teaching and learning, and innovation goals.

He previously served as the Interim Chief Information Security Officer (2021) and led the initial Institute response to the 2021 campus-wide external endpoint audit using the centralized coordination with distributed execution organizational approach. He also served as Interim Associate VP for Data Strategy and Analytics and was a member of the Data Security Task Force appointment (2020), charged with improving campus policies and practices concerning the use and sharing of sensitive data.

Since Fall 2021, he has been co-teaching a Vertically Integrated Project class focused on using data as an asset and is interested in applying knowledge graphs for data analytics. In partnership with the University of Michigan and the New School, Didier advocates for the safe and responsible use of eXtended Reality (XR) technologies in higher education. He has co-taught an Educause Learning Lab on XR Security, Privacy, Safety, and Ethics Considerations in Higher Education.

As the Director of Technology Services for CoE from 2007 to 2022, he established several partnerships with the Georgia Tech central IT organization and other academic units to develop new campus-wide services supporting the educational and research ecosystem, with a strong focus on protecting research data, empowering users, and providing equitable access. Some of these initiatives included the launch of the first large-scale GPU-enabled virtual computer lab to provide students access to scientific and engineering applications irrespective of time, place, and device constraints, and a multi-academic unit partnership to create a federated and distributed private academic cloud, supporting research and instruction.

Didier began his career at Georgia Tech in 1999 as a Research Engineer in the School of Electrical and Computing Engineering, focused on Cyber Security, HPC, Unix, and Networking, as well as contributing to research projects on hardware platforms for Network Intrusion Detection and Prevention. In addition, he partnered with faculty to get a grant from Cisco Systems and create the first hands-on network security laboratory. He also was the IT Manager for the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering from 2004 to 2007. Didier holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Diplôme d'Ingénieur (Bachelor) from the École des Mines de Nantes in France.

Tom Conte holds a joint appointment in the Schools of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the founding director of the Center for Research into Novel Computing Hierarchies (CRNCH). His research is in the areas of computer architecture and compiler optimization, with emphasis on manycore architectures, microprocessor architectures, back-end compiler code generation, architectural performance evaluation and embedded computer system architectures.

The main focus of Collard's research is the molecular self-assembly in polymers which allows for the formation of new supermolecular architectures that take on new functions and promise potential benefits and novel applications. Currently, his group is studying surfactants, spontaneously assembled monolayers, and liquid crystals. Materials under study include conjugated electronically conductive polymers and new functional polyesters. Techniques used to construct and probe the structure of our supramolecular assemblies including: synthesis, electrochemistry, thermal analysis, X-ray diffraction and microscopy.

Morris Cohen received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2003 and 2010, respectively, and served as a research scientist until August 2013. From September 2012 until August 2013, Dr. Cohen was appointed as AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation. 

In Fall 2013, he joined the faculty in the School of ECE. He is a winner of the NSF CAREER Award in 2017, the ONR Young Investigator Award in 2015, and was chosen for the Santimay Basu Prize in 2014, an award given once per 3 years to an under-35 scientist by the International Union of Radio Science (URSI). 

Dr. Cohen is interested in the natural electricity of the Earth, including lightning, the electrically charged upper atmosphere, and the radiation-filled space environment. He uses radio waves at low frequencies measured all around the world to understand them, and develops resulting practical applications. His group also works on novel techniques to generate low frequency waves with nonconventional electrically-short antennas. He is an author of more than 60 journal publications. He employs a “flipped classroom” model in some of his courses to make the experience more active and engaging. 

He enjoys hiking, cooking, and traveling the world for work and play with his family.

Dr. Gari Clifford is a tenured Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics (BMI) at Emory. His research focuses on the application of signal processing and machine learning to medicine to classify, track and predict health and illness. His focus research areas include critical care, digital psychiatry, global health, mHealth, neuroinformatics and perinatal health. After training in Theoretical Physics, he transitioned to AI and Engineering for his doctorate (DPhil) at the University of Oxford in the 1990’s. He subsequently joined MIT as a postdoctoral fellow, then Principal Research Scientist where he managed the creation of the MIMIC II database, the largest open access critical care database in the world. He later returned as an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering to Oxford, where he helped found its Sleep & Circadian Neuroscience Institute and served as Director of the Centre for Doctoral Training in Healthcare Innovation at the Oxford Institute of Biomedical Engineering. As Chair, Dr Clifford has established BMI as a leading center for critical care and mHealth informatics, and as a champion for open access data and open source software in medicine, particularly through his leadership of the PhysioNet/CinC Challenges and contributions to the PhysioNet Resource. Despite this, he is a strong supporter of commercial translation, working closely with industry, and serves as CTO of MindChild Medical, a spin out from his research at MIT.

Diego Cifuentes is an Assistant Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. His research centers around the development of mathematical optimization methods, and the application of these methods in engineering areas such as machine learning, statistics, robotics, power systems, and computer vision. He also works in the theoretical analysis of optimization methods, leveraging geometric and combinatorial information to improve efficiency and robustness. Prior to joining ISyE, he served as an applied math instructor in MIT and as a postdoctoral researcher in the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences.

He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and his B.S. in Mathematics and B.S. in Electronics Engineering from Universidad de los Andes.

Xu Chu is an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Waterloo in late 2017, and joined Georgia Tech in Jan 2018. He is a recipient of the JP Morgan Faculty Research Fellow Award, the Microsoft Ph.D. fellowship award, and the David R. Cheriton fellowship award. 

He is broadly interested in data management systems and machine learning. In particular, he focuses on (1) how to leverage advanced machine learning techniques to solve hard and practical data management problems, such as large-scale data integration; and (2) how to build data management systems to tackle the common pain points in practical machine learning, such as the lack of high-quality labeled data.

Simon Chung is a research scientist at the Institute for Data Engineering and Science. He obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests range from UI security, improving the security and usability of authentication systems, to employing the latest hardware features to improve systems security.

Edmond Chow is a Professor in the School of Computational Science in the College of Computing. He previously held positions at D. E. Shaw Research and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His research is in developing and applying numerical methods and high-performance computing to solve large-scale scientific computing problems and seeks to enable scientists and engineers to solve larger problems more efficiently using physical simulation. Specific interests include numerical linear algebra (preconditioning, multilevel methods, sparse matrix computations) and parallel methods for quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, and Brownian/Stokesian dynamics.  Chow earned an Honors B.A.Sc. in systems design engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1993, and a Ph.D. in computer science with a minor in aerospace engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1997. Chow was awarded the 2009 ACM Gordon Bell prize and the 2002 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).

Hannah Choi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech. Her research focuses on mathematical approaches to neuroscience, with primary interests in linking structures, dynamics, and computation in data-driven brain networks at multiple scales. Before coming to Georgia Tech, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington and also a visiting scientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and spent one semester at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley as a Patrick J McGovern Research Fellow. She received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Northwestern University and her BA in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley.