Animesh Garg is a Stephen Fleming Early Career Assistant Professor at School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He leads the People, AI, and Robotics (PAIR) research group. He is on the core faculty in the Robotics and Machine Learning programs. Animesh is also a Senior Researcher at Nvidia Research. Animesh earned a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and was a postdoc at the Stanford AI Lab. He is on leave from the department of Computer Science at University of Toronto and CIFAR Chair position at the Vector Institute.

Garg earned his M.S. in Computer Science and Ph.D. in Operations Research from UC, Berkeley. He worked with Ken Goldberg at Berkeley AI Research (BAIR). He also worked closely with Pieter Abbeel, Alper Atamturk & UCSF Radiation Oncology. Animesh was later a postdoc at Stanford AI Lab with Fei-Fei Li and Silvio Savarese.

Garg's research vision is to build the Algorithmic Foundations for Generalizable Autonomy, that enables robots to acquire skills, at both cognitive & dexterous levels, and to seamlessly interact & collaborate with humans in novel environments. His group focuses on understanding structured inductive biases and causality on a quest for general-purpose embodied intelligence that learns from imprecise information and achieves flexibility & efficiency of human reasoning.

Jill Gambill is the Executive Director and Senior Research Associate for the Coastal Equity and Resilience Hub in the Institute of People and Technology (IPaT) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Gambill previously spent over 12 years at the University of Georgia, where she most recently served as Coastal Resilience Specialist and Public Service Associate for Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant. In this role, she worked with vulnerable coastal communities to equitably plan for and respond to flooding from storm surge and sea level rise.

In addition to her faculty appointment with Marine Extension and Georgia Sea Grant, she is affiliate faculty with the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems, Institute for Women’s Studies and Department of Marine Sciences at the University of Georgia and Department of Environmental Health at Emory University.

Gambill is co-chair of the Georgia Coastal Hazards Community of Practice, a member of the Practitioner Consultation Board for the NASA Sea Level Change Science Team and part of the leadership team for the Georgia Climate Project, a statewide initiative aimed at strengthening research and communication on the impacts and solutions of climate change in Georgia. Gambill holds a B.A. in Philosophy from Cardiff University in Wales, an M.A. in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Sydney in Australia and earned her Ph.D. in Geography and Integrative Conservation at the University of Georgia. She is a nationally accredited Certified Floodplain Manager.

Karen M. Feigh is a Professor at Georgia Tech's Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering with a courtesy appointment in the School of Interactive Computing. As the director of the Georgia Tech Cognitive Engineering Center, she leads a research and education program focused on the computational cognitive modeling and design of cognitive work support systems and technologies to improve the performance of socio-technical systems. She is responsible for undergraduate and graduate level instruction in the areas of flight dynamics, human reliability analysis methods, human factors, human-automation interaction and cognitive engineering. Feigh has over 14 years of relevant research and design experience in fast-time air traffic simulation, ethnographic studies, airline operation control centers, synthetic vision systems for helicopters, expert systems for air traffic control towers, human extra-vehicular activities in space, and the impact of context on undersea warfighters. Recently her work has focused on human-autonomy teaming and the human experience of machine learning across a number of domains.

Feigh has served as both Co-PI and PI on a number of FAA, NIA, ONR, NSF and NASA sponsored projects. As part of her research, Feigh has published 35 scholarly papers in the field of Cognitive Engineering with primary emphasis on the aviation industry. She serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making. She previously served as the Chair to the Human Factor and Ergonomics Society’s Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making Technical Group, and on the National Research Council’s Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board (ASEB).

Brad Fain, principal research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and at the Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP), has been appointed as executive director of CACP. The appointment was announced on January 2, 2019 by Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Dean Jacqueline Royster.

Housed in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy, CACP focuses on key issues that influence the development, implementation and adoption of communications technologies. CACP work includes assessment of policy issues and production of regulatory filings, identification of future options for innovation, and articulation of a clearer vision of the ever-changing technology landscape. The Center’s research addresses a wide range of advanced communications policy issues and related technology applications, particularly in the wireless and new technology arenas.

Fain brings to bear more than twenty-five years of experience in human performance. He directs Georgia Tech’s HomeLab research initiative and leads a team that is pioneering research into issues and products design to assist with successful aging in place. He joined Georgia Institute of Technology in 1992 and has extensive experience developing technologies, evaluation processes, and curriculum in the field of accessible design. He has also led or assisted in a variety of research programs on the design of fixed and rotary wing crew interfaces, and he currently leads a project to build a virtual reality usability testbed for first responder technologies enabled by FirstNet for the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). He has performed over one hundred accessibility evaluations for national and international customers in twenty projects. He has executed over two hundred consumer product evaluation projects. He pioneered the development of Consumer Product Integration (CPI) as a design process for the realization of products with universal design features.

Fain led the National Council on Disability’s (NCD) universal design research program. The focus of the research program was to determine the impact of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act on the design and procurement of electronic and information technologies. Fain’s report contained universal design policy recommendations that were endorsed by the NCD and sent to the president of the United States for consideration. He conceived and led the development of an information portal containing information pertaining to the design and procurement of accessible electronic and information technologies. The Accessibility Assistant (http://accessibility.gtri.gatech.edu) is the culmination of eight years of accessibility research at Georgia Tech and serves over 1,500 visitors monthly.

Fain has also led the technical portion of the EAC’s Military Heroes Initiative to search for new technologies that would allow recently wounded soldiers to place a private and secure vote. He served as the technical director of the EAC’s Accessible Voting Technology Initiative (AVTI) to develop technologies solutions that facilitate accessible voting for the general population. The AVTI resulted in the development of a voting system test bed used to conduct accessibility research for ballot design and novel hardware design. He also led a NIST research grant to determine best practices for quantifying and certifying the accessibility and usability of new voting systems. Fain served as the technical director for the Information Technology and Technical Assistance Training Center (ITTATC) project. He led the needs assessment and technical assistance portions of the ITTATC project and has developed materials to support accessibility curriculum development efforts. He led the development of the Accessibility Evaluation Facility to support independent third-party evaluations of electronic and information technology accessibility and usability. In addition, he led the development of training materials to educate designers and accessibility specialists in the measurement of accessibility. In 2004, Fain modified the AEM to measure ease of use for special populations and, as a result, GTRI was named as the national test lab for the Arthritis Foundation’s Ease of Use Commendation Program.

Irfan Essa is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing and Senior Associate Dean in the College of Computing (CoC), at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Professor Essa works in the areas of Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Computer Graphics, and Social Computing, with potential impact on Content Creation, Analysis and Production (e.g., Computational Photography & Video, Image-based Modeling and Rendering, etc.) Human Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence, Computational Behavioral/Social Sciences, and Computational Journalism research.He has published over 150 scholarly articles in leading journals and conference venues on these topics and several of his papers have also won best paper awards. He has been awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and was elected an IEEE Fellow. He has held extended research consulting positions with Disney Research and Google Research and also was an Adjunct Faculty Member at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute. He joined Georgia Tech in 1996 after his earning his Master's (1990), Ph.D. (1994), and holding a research faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab (1988-1996).

Jeff Evans is a researcher with the Information Communication Laboratory (ICL) at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), where researchers work to solve complex problems in computer science, information technology, communications, networking and sociotechnical systems. Customers have included those in the Department of Defense (DoD), emergency response and health care systems spaces. Evans’ research has focused primarily on modes of communications in emerging technologies, particularly wireless systems, and he is involved as a project director for several advanced network and multimedia communications programs. One of his main research foci involves ensuring applications’ performance as they migrate across different networks for legacy systems and emerging, high-bandwidth access technologies. His early work developed into the Network Applications Integration Lab (NAIL) research testbed, which led to his working with campus and other labs across GTRI. After running some of ICL’s research programs in both the DoD and commercial spaces, he was asked to help launch up the first multi-disciplinary unit, the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) at Georgia Tech in order to integrate theoretical research, basic research and to conduct applied science about the emerging technologies that directly impact people: health care, education, humanitarian systems and media. He has helped build numerous international and industry partnerships, as well as multidisciplinary “living lab” test beds. Evans helped co-found GTRI’s Foundations for the Future (F3) program, which helps to bring Georgia Tech’s expertise into the state’s K-12 classrooms. ICL also has nationally recognized initiatives that includes the FalconView™ Program, the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) information exchange standards; communications research and antenna networks, both for troops and for evaluating IED countermeasures; emergency management technologies; and are developing a comprehensive approach to the Internet of Things.

Alex Endert is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. He directs the Visual Analytics Lab, where he works with his students to design and study how interactive visual tools help people make sense of data and AI. His lab often tests these advances in domains, including intelligence analysis, cyber security, decision-making, manufacturing safety, and others. His lab receives generous support from sponsors, including NSF, DOD, DHS, DARPA, DOE, and industry. In 2018, he received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for his work on visual analytics by demonstration. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 2012. In 2013, his work on Semantic Interaction was awarded the IEEE VGTC VPG Pioneers Group Doctoral Dissertation Award, and the Virginia Tech Computer Science Best Dissertation Award.