Paul M.A. Baker, Ph.D., is the Senior Director, Research and Strategic Innovation at the Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP), and Chief Operating Officer, Center for the Development and Application of Internet of Things Technologies (CDAIT). He is also a Principal Research Scientist with the School of Public Policy. Previously he was the Associate Director of the Center for 21st Century Universities (C21U). Aside from exploring the diffusion innovation and policy in IoT, recent research projects include innovation driven workforce development, mapping the role of intermediaries in innovation networks, usability of voting technologies, implementation of accessible technologies. His work in policy studies include barriers to the adoption of wireless technologies by people with disabilities, teleworking and people with disabilities; social media innovation, online collaboration and virtual communities. He is also involved in international policy research and collaborative policy networks, especially as it relates to issues of technology and usability policy, workforce development and innovation diffusion. 

Baker holds a Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Mason University, a Master’s degree in Theological Studies from Emory University, M.P. in Urban Planning from the University of Virginia, and an M.A. in International Commerce and Policy from George Mason University. He has served on a variety of national boards and panels, and as a grant proposal reviewer for U.S. Department of Education, the Academy of Finland, the Israel Science Foundation, and the NTIA, US Department of Commerce. He serves also on editorial boards and as a reviewer for 15 journals. His co-edited (with Jarice Hanson and Jeremy Hunsinger) volume, “The Unconnected: Social Justice, Participation, and Engagement in the Information Society” was published in 2013.

Turgay Ayer is the Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. Ayer also serves as the research director for healthcare analytics and business intelligence in the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems at Georgia Tech and holds a courtesy appointment at Emory Medical School.

His research focuses on healthcare analytics and socially responsible business analytics with a particular emphasis on practice-focused research. His research papers have been published in top tier management, engineering, and medical journals, and covered by popular media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, U.S. News, and NPR.

Ayer has received over $2.5 million grant funding and several awards for his work, including an NSF CAREER Award (2015), first place in MSOM Responsible Research in Operations Management (2019), first place in the MSOM Best Practice-Based Research Competition (2017), INFORMS Franz Edelman Laureate Award (2017), and Society for Medical Decision Making Lee Lusted Award (2009).

Ayer serves an associate editor for Operations Research, Management Science, and MSOM, and is a past president of the INFORMS Health Application Society. He received a B.S. in industrial engineering from Sabanci University in Istanbul, Turkey, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Arriaga is a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher in the School of Interactive Computing. She uses psychological concepts, theories and methods to address fundamental topics of HCI and Social Computing. Her current research interests are in the area of chronic care management and mental health. She designs mHealth systems that address gaps in chronic care and mental health management. The computational systems she designs: foster engagement, facilitate continuity of care, promote patient self-advocacy, and mediate communication between patient and healthcare providers.

Ronald C. Arkin received the B.S. Degree from the University of Michigan, the M.S. Degree from Stevens Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1987. He then assumed the position of Assistant Professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology where he now holds the rank of Regents' Professor and is the Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory. He also serves as the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech since October 2008. During 1997-98, Professor Arkin served as STINT visiting Professor at the Centre for Autonomous Systems at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. From June-September 2005, Prof. Arkin held a Sabbatical Chair at the Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratory in Tokyo, Japan and then served as a member of the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Group at LAAS/CNRS in Toulouse, France from October 2005-August 2006.

Annie Anton, Ph.D., is a professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, which she chaired until 2017. Previously, she served as a professor in the Computer Science Department of the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University, where she was director of the CSC Policy and Compliance Initiative and a member of the NCSU Cyber Defense Lab. In 2010, she chaired the NC State University Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure Committee. In 2008, she chaired the NC State Public Policy Task Force. Anton's research focuses on methods and tools to support the specification of complete, correct behavior of software systems used in environments that pose risks of loss as a consequence of failures and misuse. This includes systems in which the security of personal and private information is particularly vulnerable. Current extensions to this work, include the analysis of federal security and privacy regulations, and compliance practices. Anton is the founder and director of ThePrivacyPlace.org, a research group of students and faculty at Georgia Tech, CMU, NC State and UMBC. This group is interested in technologies that assist practitioners and policy makers in meeting the challenge of eliciting and expressing policies and regulations (a form of requirements). These tools help ensure that software systems are aligned with the privacy polices and regulations that govern these systems. Her professional activities include a notable combination of multi-disciplinary research and education. She is co-founder of the annual Requirements Engineering and the Law Workshop (RELAW). She is a former associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, cognitive issues subject area editor for the Requirements Engineering Journal, and the International Board of Referees for Computers & Security. Antón has served on various boards, ﾠincluding: ﾠPresident Obama's Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, the NIST Information Security & Privacy Advisory Board, the IEEE Computer Society Research Board, an Intel Corporation Advisory Board, the Future of Privacy Forum Advisory Board. ﾠShe is a former member of the U.S. DHS Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee, the CRA Board of Directors, the NSF Computer & Information Science & Engineering Directorate Advisory Council, the Distinguished External Advisory Board for the TRUST Research Center at U.C. Berkeley, the DARPA ISAT Study Group, the USACM Public Policy Council, the Advisory Board for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., the Georgia Tech Alumni Association Board of Trustees, the Microsoft Research University Relations Faculty Advisory Board, the CRA-W, the Georgia Tech Advisory Board (GTAB), and Corporate Secretary for Trekking for Kids, Inc.

Clio Andris is an associate professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. Her research is on mathematical models of social networks, social flows, and interpersonal relationships in geographic space, applied to issues of urban planning, visualization, transportation and geography. She teaches GIScience classes at multiple levels including Environmental GIS and Spatial Network Analysis, as well as classes on Information Visualization. She is a member of the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization (CSPAV) and an affiliate of the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development (CQGRD). She is also a member of the School of Interactive Computing's Information Visualization research group. She received her PhD from MIT in 2011 in Urban Information Systems where she was an NDSEG fellow and member of the Senseable City Lab. She held postdoctoral positions at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) at the Santa Fe Institute.

Academic Specialty: 
Geographic Information Science and Technology

David V. Anderson received the B.S and M.S. degrees from Brigham Young University and the Ph.D. degree from Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in 1993, 1994, and 1999, respectively. He is currently a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech. Anderson's research interests include audio and psycho-acoustics, machine learning and signal processing in the context of human auditory characteristics, and the real-time application of such techniques. His research has included the development of a digital hearing aid algorithm that has now been made into a successful commercial product. Anderson was awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER Award for excellence as a young educator and researcher in 2004 and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in the same year. He has over 150 technical publications and 8 patents/patents pending. Anderson is a senior member of the IEEE, and a member the Acoustical Society of America, and Tau Beta Pi. He has been actively involved in the

Gregory D. Abowd is Dean of the College of Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University. Prior to joining Northeastern in March 2021, he was a Regents’ Professor and held the J.Z. Liang Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also served as Associate Dean of Research and Space for the College of Computing. Abowd is an internationally renowned and highly cited scientist, well known for his contributions in the general area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and specifically for his groundbreaking research in ubiquitous computing.

In more than 26 years at Georgia Tech, Dr. Abowd initiated bold and innovative research efforts, such as Classroom 2000 and the Aware Home, as well as pioneering innovations in autism and technology, health systems, CampusLife, and a joint initiative with engineering in computational materials. He was on the founding editorial board of IEEE Pervasive Computing Magazine, and was founding Editor-in-Chief of Foundations and Trends in HCI and The Proceedings of the ACM in Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies. He also founded the non-profit Atlanta Autism Consortium in 2008 to serve and unite the various stakeholder communities in Atlanta connected to autism research and services.

Dean Abowd’s contributions to the fields of Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing have been recognized through numerous awards. In 2008, he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. That same year, he was inducted into the ACM CHI Academy, the most prestigious honor for researchers in HCI. In 2009, he received the ACM Eugene Lawler Humanitarian Award for his work in autism and technology. As of 2020, he graduated 30 Ph.D. students, 20 of whom have gone on to successful careers at top universities around the world.

Dr. Abowd received the degree of B.S. in Honors Mathematics in 1986 from the University of Notre Dame. He then attended the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom on a Rhodes Scholarship, earning the degrees of M.Sc. (1987) and D.Phil. (1991) in Computation from the Programming Research Group in the Computing Laboratory. From 1989-1992 he was a Research Associate/Postdoc with the Human-Computer Interaction Group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of York in England. From 1992-1994, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Software Engineering Institute and the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.