Rahul Saxena serves as director of CREATE-X. Before joining Georgia Tech, he built a diverse career as a venture capitalist, startup CEO, entrepreneur, mechatronic design engineer, and published academic researcher. Saxena is a mechanical engineering Georgia Tech alumnus, earned his European Master’s degree in Fluid Mechanics from the Von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics, and earned his MBA from Emory University. Saxena worked for Seraph Group, a venture capital firm, for 10 years evaluating and investing in companies while also holding the role of CEO in a company and serving on several boards of companies that went on to be acquired.

Matt works with Georgia Tech researchers and students, along with industry partners in the creation of innovative mobile and converged applications and services. He is also the Associate Director, and co-founder, of the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center, a unique research center supporting industry and student engagement through research and operational projects; and the wireless services manager for Georgia Tech in the Office of Information Technology. Matt is a principal in the annual Convergence Innovation Competition, now in its ninth year, which provides industry sponsors an opportunity to engage students in wide ranging categories which they define and judge. Matt is also responsible for The GT Journey project which includes GT mobile, an HTML5 based portal for mobile, desktop, and kiosks; and GT DevHub where any member of the campus community can access campus IT services and contribute content, meta-data, and the applications themselves.

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. 

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.

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 principal 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.