Walter Rich is a research communications program manager in Georgia Tech's Institute Communications supporting the Institute for People and Technology and Georgia Tech research communications.

Mark Riedl is an Associate 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.

Arthi Rao is a research scientist at the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development at Georgia Tech. She has had a consistent focus on Health and Place research throughout her career. She has an interdisciplinary educational and professional background in Urban Planning, Epidemiology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) from Georgia Tech. Her research interests focus on social determinants of health, healthcare access, healthy communities, and spatial methods. She uses methods including spatial clustering, data mining/classification techniques and hierarchical modeling in her research. She has integrated these methods to create decision-support tools for academic and industrial applications.

She regularly collaborates with researchers at The Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Tech, and the American Planning Association as a subject matter expert on healthy communities’ research and geospatial methods. She has published in journals on the topics of Health Impact Assessment (HIA), sustainability, walkability analysis, regional planning, and therapeutic landscapes. She also teaches courses titled “Public Health and the Built Environment” and “Public Health Analytics” at Georgia Tech.

Specialization Area: Health and Environment

Peter Presti is a senior research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology. During his 22 years with the university he has collaborated with companies such as IBM, Humana, Google, Microsoft, Intel, Alcatel-Lucent, Bellsouth, Denon Nippon-Columbia, and others. Government research sponsors have included DARPA, NIH, NSF, DoE, USDA, and the VA. His areas of research include sensor systems and biometrics, wearable computers, signal processing, pattern recognition, embedded systems, electronics design, data visualization and computer graphics, and computational geometry. His background spanning both custom hardware and software development provides him the skills to design and build fully integrated prototype systems, and in past projects has designed and built high-speed data capture systems, a variety of kinetic sensors, biometric sensors, and wearable computer systems.

Noah Posner is a research scientist with the Institute for People and Technology and lab manager of the Interactive Product Design Lab (IPDL) in the School of Industrial Design. His focus is on creating interactive experiences that leverage physical interaction. He holds degrees in Industrial Design, Mechanical Engineering and an M.S. in Human Computer Interaction. His research involves creating rich physical interactions, designing and fabricating interactive devices using CAD and Rapid prototyping technologies, and developing educational tools for STEAM leaning that focus on utilizing hands on learning with intentionally designed artifacts. He also teaches courses in Physical Prototyping for Human Computer Interaction and Industrial Design. 

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.

David Peeler is a research scientist and a recent graduate from Georgia Tech having completed a bachelor's degree in computer science in May 2022. His research interests lie in machine learning, mobile (Android) development, and STEM education. Currently, he is supporting the TechSAge D2 fall detection project detecting and reporting user falls from wheelchairs. He is also supporting STEM @ GTRI's rural education project giving 1000+ hours of direct instruction and curriculum development of different topics of computer science to high schoolers.

Andrea Grimes Parker is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University and at Morehouse School of Medicine. Dr. Parker holds a Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing from Georgia Tech and a B.S. in Computer Science from Northeastern University. She is the founder and director of the Wellness Technology Lab at Georgia Tech. Her interdisciplinary research spans the domains of human-computer interaction and public health, as she examines how social and interactive computing systems can be designed to address health inequities. Dr. Parker has published widely in the space of digital health equity and received several best paper honorable mention awards for her research. Her research has been funded through awards from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Aetna Foundation, Google, and Johnson & Johnson.