Jim Budd brings 15 years of academic and research leadership in human-centered, interactive product design, as well as two decades of corporate design experience to the school. Most recently, he was associate professor of industrial and interaction design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where he headed the Wearables and Interactive Products Lab. Jim Budd is the past chair of Georgia Tech's School of Industrial Design. 

Rahul Saxena is the Interim Director for CREATE-X and the Associate Director for LAUNCH. Leading up to this role, Saxena had a 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. 

Kait Morano is a Research Scientist II at the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). Her interests include urban planning, climate change, and spatial analysis, and her work focuses on designing innovative, equitable strategies to build community resilience. At IPaT, she serves as the Resilience Planning Director of the Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub.

Kait holds a bachelor’s in Geography from Virginia Tech and a master’s of City and Regional Planning from Georgia Tech, where she specialized in Geographic Information Systems. Prior to joining IPaT, Kait worked in local government on the Georgia coast, at the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization at Georgia Tech, and as an ORISE Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Judy Hoffman is an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, a member of the Machine Learning Center, and a Diversity and Inclusion Fellow. Her research lies at the intersection of computer vision and machine learning with specialization in domain adaptation, transfer learning, adversarial robustness, and algorithmic fairness. She has received numerous awards including the Samsung AI Researcher of the Year Award (2021), the NVIDIA female leader in computer vision award (2020), AIMiner top 100 most influential scholars in Machine Learning (2020), MIT EECS Rising Star in 2015, and is a recipient of the NSF Graduate Fellowship. In addition to her research, she co-founded and continues to advise for Women in Computer Vision, an organization which provides mentorship and travel support for early-career women in the computer vision community. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she was a research scientist at Facebook AI Research. She received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2016 after which she completed postdocs at Stanford University (2017) and UC Berkeley (2018).

I am currently Professor and KUKA Chair for Robotics in the School of Interactive Computing, and the Executive Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent machines at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I am also Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Richard DeMillo is the Charlotte B. and Roger C. Warren Professor of Computing at Georgia Tech. He was formerly the John P. Imlay Dean of Computing. Positions he has held prior to joining Georgia Tech include: Chief Technology Officer for Hewlett-Packard, Vice President of Computing Research for Bell Communications Research, Director of the Computer Research Division for the National Science Foundation, and Director of the Software Test and Evaluation Project for the Office of the US Secretary of Defense. He has also held faculty positions at the University of Wisconsin, Purdue University and the University of Padua, Italy. His research includes over 100 articles, books and patents in algorithms, software and computer engineering, cryptography, and cyber security. In 1982, he wrote the first policy for testing software intensive systems for the US Department of Defense. DeMillo and his collaborators launched and developed the field of program mutation for software testing. He is a co-inventor of Differential Fault Cryptanalysis and holds what is believed to be the only patent on breaking public key cryptosystems. He currently works in the area of election and voting system security. His work has been cited in court cases, including a 2019 Federal Court decision declaring unconstitutional the use of paperless voting machines. He has served as a foreign election observer for the Carter Center and is a member of the State of Michigan Election Security Commission. He has served on boards of public and private cybersecurity and privacy companies, including RSA Security and SecureWorks. He has served on many non-profit and philanthropic boards including the Exploratorium and the Campus Community Partnership Foundation (formerly the Rosalind and Jimmy Carter Foundation). He is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2010, he founded the Center for 21st Century Universities, Georgia Tech’s living laboratory for fundamental change in higher education. He served as Executive Director for ten years. He was named Lumina Foundation Fellow for his work in higher education. His 2015 book Revolution in Higher Education, published by MIT Press, won the Best Education Book award from the American Association of Publishers and helped spark a national conversation about online education.  He co-chaired Georgia Tech’s Commission on Creating the Next in Education.  The Commission’s report was released in 2018. He received the ANAK Society’s Outstanding Faculty Member Award.

Dr. Dellaert does research in the areas of robotics and computer vision, which present some of the most exciting challenges to anyone interested in artificial intelligence. He is especially keen on Bayesian inference approaches to the difficult inverse problems that keep popping up in these areas. In many cases, exact solutions to these problems are intractable, and as such he is interested in examining whether Monte Carlo (sampling-based) approxIMaTions are applicable in those cases.

Pinar Keskinocak is the William W. George Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. She is also co-founder and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems. Previously, she served as the College of Engineering ADVANCE Professor and as interim associate dean for faculty development and scholarship. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she worked at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. She received her Ph.D. in Operations Research from Carnegie Mellon University, and her M.S. and B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Bilkent University. 

Dr. Keskinocak's research focuses on the applications of operations research and management science with societal impact, particularly health and humanitarian applications, supply chain management, and logistics/transportation. Her recent work has addressed infectious disease modeling (including Covid-19, malaria, Guinea worm, pandemic flu), evaluating intervention strategies, and resource allocation; catch-up scheduling for vaccinations; hospital operations management; disaster preparedness and response (e.g., prepositioning inventory); debris management; centralized and decentralized price and lead time decisions. She has worked on projects with companies, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and healthcare providers, including American Red Cross, CARE, Carter Center, CDC, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory University, and Intel Corporation. 

She is an INFORMS Fellow and currently serves as the president of INFORMS. Previously she served as the Secretary of INFORMS, a department editor for Operations Research (Policy Modeling and Public Sector area), associate editor for Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and INFORMS Vice President of Membership and Professional Recognition. She is the co-founder and past-president of INFORMS Section on Public Programs, Service, and Needs, and the president of the INFORMS Health Applications Society.