Duen Horng "Polo" Chau, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering, and an Associate Director of the MS Analytics program. He holds a Ph.D. and Master's in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University, where his doctoral thesis won CMU’s Computer Science Dissertation Award, Honorable Mention. Chau has received faculty awards from Google, Yahoo, and LexisNexis. He also received the Raytheon Faculty Fellowship, Edenfield Faculty Fellowship, Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. He is the only two-time Symantec fellow and an award-winning designer. Chau’s research lab  -- the Polo Club of Data Science -- bridges data mining and HCI to solve large-scale, real-world problems by developing scalable, interactive, and interpretable tools for big data analytics. The group's "Polonium" malware detection technology (patented with Symantec) protects 120 million people worldwide. Its auction fraud detection research was widely covered by media, and its fake-review-detection research received the “Best Student Paper” award at the 2014 SIAM Data Mining Conference. Other work has addressed content spam, insider trading, and unauthorized mobile device access. He co-organized the IDEA workshop series at KDD that facilitate cross-pollination across HCI and data mining. He served as general chair for ACM IUI 2015 and was a steering committee member of the conference.

Srinivas Aluru is executive director of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) and professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. He co-leads the NSF South Big Data Regional Innovation Hub which nurtures big data partnerships between organizations in the 16 Southern States and Washington D.C., and the NSF Transdisciplinary Research Institute for Advancing Data Science. Aluru conducts research in high performance computing, large-scale data analysis, bioinformatics and systems biology, combinatorial scientific computing, and applied algorithms. An early pioneer in big data, Aluru led one of the eight inaugural mid-scale NSF-NIH Big Data projects awarded in the first round of federal big data investments in 2012. He has contributed to NITRD and OSTP led white house workshops, and NSF and DOE led efforts to create and nurture research in big data and exascale computing. He is a recipient of the NSF Career award, IBM faculty award, Swarnajayanti Fellowship from the Government of India, the John. V. Atanasoff Discovery Award from Iowa State University, and the Outstanding Senior Faculty Research Award, Dean's award for faculty excellence, and the Outstanding Research Program Development Award at Georgia Tech. He is a Fellow of AAAS, IEEE, and SIAM, and is a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society Golden Core and Meritorious Service awards.

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. 

Research in the Sherrill group focuses on the development of ab initio electronic structure theory and its application to problems of broad chemical interest, including the influence of non-covalent interactions in drug binding, biomolecular structure, organic crystals, and organocatalytic transition states. We seek to apply the most accurate quantum models possible for a given problem, and we specialize in generating high-quality datasets for testing new methods or machine-learning purposes. We have developed highly efficient algorithms and software to perform symmetry-adapted perturbation theory (SAPT) computations of intermolecular interactions, and we have used this software to analyze the nature of non-covalent pi-interactions in terms of electrostatics, London dispersion forces, induction/polarization, and short range exchange-repulsion. 

Kishore Ramachandran received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1986, and has been on the faculty of Georgia Tech since then. He led the definition of the curriculum and the implementation for an online MS program in Computer Science (OMSCS) using MOOC technology for the College of Computing, which is currently providing an opportunity for students world-wide (with an enrollment of over 10,000) to pursue a low-cost graduate education in computer science. He has served as the Director of STAR Center from 2007 to 2014, and as the Director of Korean Programs for the College of Computing from 2007 to 2011. Ramachandran has also served as the Chair of the Core Computing Division within the College of Computing. His research interests are in architectural design, programming, and analysis of parallel and distributed systems. Currently, he is leading a project that deals with large-scale situation awareness using distributed camera networks and multi-modal sensing with applications to surveillance, connected vehicles, and transportation. He is the recipient of an NSF PYI Award in 1990, the Georgia Tech doctoral thesis advisor award in 1993, the College of Computing Outstanding Senior Research Faculty award in 1996, the College of Computing Dean's Award in 2003 and 2014, the College of Computing William "Gus'' Baird Teaching Award in 2004, the "Peter A. Freeman Faculty Award" from the College of Computing in 2009 and in 2013, the Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award from the College of Computing in 2014, and became an IEEE Fellow in 2014.

Tony Pan is a Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS). He develops high performance computing algorithms and implementations and data management solutions for IDEaS research efforts and collaborations. Dr. Pan's research interests focus around enabling large scale bioinformatic and biomedical studies through secure, multi-institutional data sharing and efficient parallel algorithms for architectures ranging from CPUs and GPUs to leadership-class supercomputers. He has more than two decades of experience in industry and academia in developing data science solutions for applications including cancer research cyberinfrastructure, microscopy imaging, and DNA sequence analysis.

Dr. Rawlings-Goss is responsible for interfacing with industry to cultivate industrial partnerships and embedded innovations labs, organizing workshops, retreats on topics relevant to emerging initiatives, job fairs, and numerous other activities. She builds bridges between industry and IRI activities. Renata brings rich experience in Big Data technology and policy from the National Science Foundation and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. During her tenure, she co-led inter-agency Big Data initiatives and led the formation of the National Data Science Organizers group. She is a biophysicist and her scientific work, at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, was focused on biophysics, bioinformatics and next-generation genomics research. She also plays the lead role in managing the NSF South Big Data Innovation Hub from Georgia Tech. Dr. Rawlings-Goss has a Ph.D. in Biophysics.

Jacob Abernethy is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech. He started his faculty career in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. He completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, and then spent two years as a Simons postdoctoral fellow at the CIS department at UPenn. Abernethy's primary interest is in Machine Learning, with a particular focus in sequential decision making, online learning, online algorithms and adversarial learning models. He did his Master's degree at TTI-C, and his Bachelor's Degree at MIT.