Ashwin Renganathan is a member of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science.

My current research involves the modeling of certain types of human activity that exhibit regular spatio- and/or temporal patterns. As a case study, we have generally focused on various types of criminal behavior, since there are clear patterns in this activity and we have access to relatively large amounts of data. A large portion of this work aims to model the formation and dynamics of crime "hotspots" - spatio-temporal regions of increased criminal activity. Working with data provided by the Los Angeles and Long Beach police departments, we have developed methods of measuring the repeat and near-repeat criminal events that are the hallmarks of hotspot formation. We have also constructed a family of discrete models that allow for such patterns to develop from natural criminal behavior, and have derived continuum approximations of these discrete models. Some output from one of many simulations (right) illustrates this finding, with "hot" areas in red and "cold" areas in purple. 

In addition to the work on crime hotspots, this overarching project has also included: more accurate predictions of when and where crimes will occur, based on self-exciting point process models borrowed from seismology; the study of gang territoriality, modeled via diffusive Lotka-Volterra equations; gang retaliatory violence, and how the police may be able to solve such crimes using constrained optimization; the evolution of gang rivalry networks in the presence of retaliation and third-party effects; game theoretic models for the levels of both crime and cooperation with the authorities in society; and new methods for finding the "anchor points" of criminals given the locations of crimes they committed, based on models inspired by animal foraging.

Chris Le Dantec is currently a Professor of the Practice and Director of Digital Civic Initiatives in the Khoury College of Computer Science and the College of Arts, Media and Design at Northeastern University. 

He is also an Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, jointly appointed in the School of Interactive Computing and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. He teaches in the Human-Centered Computing, HCI, and Digital Media programs.

Christine P. Ries is Professor in the School of Economics at Georgia Tech. She received a Ph.D. in International Business Economics from The University of Chicago (1977) and came to Georgia Tech as Professor and Chair (1997-99) of the School of Economics.  She has previously held faculty positions at The Harvard Business School, The Fuqua School of Business at Duke, the Peter F. Drucker Graduate Management Center at Claremont, and at Stanford University. At Claremont she was Senior Associate at the Center for Politics and Economics.  She is now a Senior Fellow at the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, Adjunct Scholar at Foundation for Education in Economics, Board of Policy Advisors Heartland Institute, Faculty Associate at Georgia Tech’s Program in Science Technology and Innovation Policy, faculty member of Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities and a member of the Philadelphia Society and the selective Policy@Tech Campus Partners.  Finally, she is member of the Georgia Tech Faculty Council on Big Data and Engineering and the Data Dominators Affinity Group.

Dr. Ries studies and teaches principles of free market economics and their application in corporate decision making and the creation of economic value for companies, states and countries. She is a specialist in international financial economics, corporate financial management, and organizational economics and governance.  In this context, her work has extended into issues of Big Data as it affects corporate and industrial transformation and public policy and analysis.  Her work ties together foreign exchange risk management, corporate decision-making, strategy and corporate value. This work has extended into value-based analytics in a global economy. She has addressed corporate political risk in assessing how corporate strategies predict and respond to shifts in government trade, commercial and capital controls policies. Her articles include publications in The Journal of International Business Studies, The Harvard Business Review, Euromoney, and The Financial Analysts’ Journal, among others. She is the author of over 20 widely used case studies that have been published by the Harvard Business School and reprinted elsewhere. She has served as consultant and advisor to many U.S. and foreign corporations, financial institutions, universities, and governments.  These include IBM, Citicorp, Morgan Guarantee Trust, Chase Manhattan Bank, Barclays Bank, Lucky Goldstar Corp., and others. 

For governments of states and foreign countries, especially in emerging market countries, she advises and consults on tax, regulation and capital control policies and their impacts on relative competitiveness success in attracting investment and business. Her books address the strategies and policies of international corporations, the politics and economics of emerging markets and the interface between corporate strategy and government policy. She has served on the Executive and Editorial Boards of The Academy of International Business and on the editorial boards and as referee of several major professional and academic journals.

She has experience on corporate boards of advisors and her experience on not-for-profit boards is extensive. She recently served as Trustee and Chair of Education Committee for The Atlanta International School and as Treasurer for The Care and Counseling Center of Georgia. Dr. Ries has delivered speeches and public lectures around the globe and is the recipient of several teaching awards.  In additional to teaching courses in international finance, corporate financial policy and strategy, corporate/government interface, and markets and organizations she has created innovative courses including The Global Economy, Network Economics and Economic and Financial Modeling, and a capstone course for GT economics majors. The later required students to assess the internal economies of companies and their impact on the economy of the State of Georgia. 

After being appointed to the Special Council for Tax Reform and Fairness for Georgians in 2010, Dr. Ries focused her expertise on the problem of tax structure and economic growth in Georgia. On the Council, she organized and promoted private sector teams from mining, manufacturing and agricultural industries to streamline and rationalize Georgia’s tax code describing sales tax exemptions for business. This code modernization was enacted into law in 2012 and dramatically increased code transparency and reduced the cost of compliance for businesses in Georgia. She has created a tax calculator game to facilitate much greater public understanding of tax policy dynamics and improve the quality of public discussion by providing accurate measures of the impact of various tax reform alternatives.

Active involvement in the economic health and competitive attractiveness of Georgia has led her to extend her long-standing interest and activities in children and K-12 education. She is an active proponent of a state charter school strategy that supports Georgia’s economic growth and facilitates the creation of an education-rich environment in the state.  She is currently member GCA’s Academic Oversight and Finance Committees of the board of the Georgia Cyber Academy, a state-wide K-12 virtual school system with nearly 14,000 students.  It is the largest public school in Georgia and the third largest K-12 Cyber Academy the U.S. She was recently a member of the board of the Georgia Charter Educational Foundation contributing to the governance and educational committees. Previously, she served as a Trustee of the Atlanta International School where she chaired the Education Committee and served on the Headmaster Evaluation and Support Committee and the Finance Committee. Within the university system she has longed worked on the use of computers and information technology in education, strategic planning, financial planning, endowment investment, academic standards and the integration into the curriculum of an international perspective. In the last year, she converted her class, The Global Economy, to a hybrid format mixing face-to-face and online learning and is engaged in offering increasing numbers of on-line courses. She is also an active speaker and conference contributor on the subject of on-line and hybrid learning.

Dr. Ries is a frequent speaker on radio and television on topics of economic and tax reform, education reform, government budgeting and spending, global economic issues, Big Data, Analytics and corporate investment and Georgia economic development.

Dr. Duarte is excited to join the Department of Psychology at U.T. Austin starting in Fall, 2021 after 13 years as a professor at The Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Duarte received her Ph.D. in Neurobiology from U.C. Berkeley in 2004 and conducted her postdoctoral work in cognitive neuroscience at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, UK. Dr. Duarte is a cognitive neuroscientist who uses multiple, complementary neuroscience methods including electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and neuropsychological methods (i.e. neurological patients), to understand the neural mechanisms of age-related changes in episodic memory, which is memory for personally experienced events. The major aim of her research program is to understand the neural changes that underlie age-related decline in episodic memory, why some people age better, from a neural and cognitive perspective, than others, and to develop and implement effective interventions to alleviate this decline. She has longstanding and active interdisciplinary collaborations with neurologists, neuropsychologists, and sleep disorder clinicians, and with mechanical engineers, to investigate experimental manipulations that may ameliorate episodic memory impairments in people with Alzheimer’s disease pathology, and to explore sleep-related biomarkers of Alzheimer’s pathology. She has a particular interest in the cognitive neuroscience of aging in racial/ethnic minorities and the psychosocial factors like race-related stress, depression, and acculturation that influence memory and underlying brain function in diverse populations. Her lab's work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Science Daily, and Ozy. 

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.

Pam Buffington is the executive director of Foundational Infrastructure & Technology within the Office of Information Technology (OIT). Pam has extensive experience at Georgia Tech and has worked in a variety of roles and responsibilities since 1995, enabling innovative uses of information technologies in both research and academic/instructional capacities. Most recently, she served as director of Research Cyberinfrastructure & Computing – guiding the work of the Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment – or PACE. PACE is a collaboration between Georgia Tech faculty and OIT with a focus on high performance computing infrastructure with technical support services. Prior to her time leading PACE, Pam led OIT’s Digital Learning Team as associate director of Academic Technologies and steered external relations activities for Center for 21st Century Universities, or C21U.  

Pam is also a published researcher who most recently co-authored Semi-Automatic Hybrid Software Deployment Workflow in a Research Computing Center. An official “Double Jacket,” Pam earned both her undergraduate (BS’95) and Master of Business Administration (MBA ’23) degrees from Georgia Tech.