James Hudgens leads more than 2,900 employees conducting more than $830 million in research across a variety of disciplines, including science, engineering, economics, policy and technical expertise to address national security, state, and industry challenges. Please visit his research profile for additional biographical information.

Harley Hamilton is a member of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science.

Eric Gilbert is the John Derby Evans Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He also has a courtesy appointment in CSE. Before coming to Michigan, he was on the faculty at Georgia Tech. At Michigan, he runs the comp.social lab, and is affiliated with SMRL, CSMR, MISC, and ESC. Dr. Gilbert is a sociotechnologist, with a research focus on building and studying social media systems. His work has been supported by grants from the SSRC, Rockefeller Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Facebook, Samsung, Yahoo!, Google, ARL, DARPA, and NSF.

Dr. Gilbert's work has been recognized with multiple best paper awards, as well as covered by outlets including Wired, NPR, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, the Georgia Tech Young Faculty Award, the CSCW Service Award, and the UIUC CS Distinguished Alumni Award. He previously served as a Program Chair and the Steering Committee Chair for ICWSM, and as a General Chair for CSCW; he currently serves as an Editor for CSCW. Prof. Gilbert is an alum of Teach For America (Chicago '02), and holds a BS in Math & CS and a PhD in CS—both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

DeBrae Kennedy-Mayo is a faculty member at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. Kennedy-Mayo co-developed and currently co-teaches “Privacy for Professionals,” a graduate-level online privacy class, where she has received numerous Thank-a-Teacher recognitions. Her research focuses on legal and policy implications of technology, privacy, and cybersecurity. Kennedy-Mayo is also a Senior Fellow with the Cross-Border Data Forum.

Kennedy-Mayo is the co-author of several editions of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) book entitled U.S. PRIVATE-SECTOR PRIVACY: LAW AND PRACTICE FOR INFORMATION PRIVACY PROFESSIONALS – the book used by individuals preparing for the IAPP certification exam on U.S. private-sector privacy. Kennedy-Mayo is the co-author of numerous articles related to technology, privacy and cybersecurity, with particular focus on the implications of data localization as well as the challenges of law enforcement in accessing electronic evidence. Kennedy-Mayo regularly speaks at conferences around the world on these topics.

Prior to joining Georgia Tech’s faculty, Kennedy-Mayo served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Georgia and an Assistant District Attorney in several counties in Georgia. During this time, Kennedy-Mayo litigated in state and federal courts, and also handled the appeals of her cases.

Kennedy-Mayo graduated with honors from the Emory University School of Law, where she was a managing editor for the Emory International Law Journal and was the founder of the Atlanta Bureau of the Internet Law Journal. At Emory Law, Kennedy-Mayo was named an Atlanta Law School Foundation Fellow. Kennedy-Mayo graduated with honors from Winthrop University, where she was the recipient of the Wylie Mathematics Scholarship.

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.