Magdalena Balazinska
University of Washington
Assistant professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

 

Magdalena's research interests are broadly in the fields of databases and distributed systems. Her current research focuses on building data management systems to help us monitor our physical and digital worlds at a fine grain and in real-time. To achieve this goal, she is building a stream processing engine that integrates live sensor data with the rich, historical data that accumulates over time. She is also exploring techniques to enable monitoring systems to handle dirty sensor data. She is working in particular with inaccurate and often ambiguous RFID data. Before joining the University of Washington, Magdalena Balazinska received a PhD from MIT in February 2006 and a B.E and M.S. from École Polytechnique de Montréal in March and May 2000, respectively.

Josh Bongard
University of Vermont
Assistant professor
Department of Computer Science

 

Bongard most recently worked at the Computational Synthesis Laboratory in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell, where he was a post doctoral associate working on robotic self-learning and self-constructive methods. He has already published 26 articles – several of them highly cited and referenced. His research on evolvable robots has been funded by NASA and featured in New Scientist Magazine. He is also the co-author of two books – Co-evolutionary Methods: For System Design and Analysis in Engineering and How the Body Shapes the Way We Think. He taught at the University of Zurich where he worked in the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the in the Software Engineering Group while finishing his thesis: Incremental Approaches to the Combined Evolution of a Robot’s Body and Brain

Yixin Chen
Washington University in St. Louis
Assistant professor
Department of Computer Science and Engineering

 

Chen received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005 and joined the faculty of Washington University that same year. He has been honored as an Early Career Principal Investigator by the Department of Energy, and has co-developed winning, automated planning systems in the recent two International Planning Competitions. Chen’s research interests include nonlinear optimization, artificial intelligence and data mining. Specifically, Chen hopes that the overall contribution of his research will be a generalized approach that will significantly reduce the complexity of solving constrained nonlinear programming (NLP) problems arising from applications such as medical operations, computational biology, machine learning, planning and scheduling, and engineering design.

Adam Siepel
Cornell University
Assistant professor
Biological Statistics & Computational Biology

 

Siepel works in the area where computer science, statistics, evolutionary biology, and genomics meet. His main focus is on developing computational methods for the identification of novel functional elements in the human genome, including genes, regulatory elements, and structural RNAs. His general approach is to model the evolution and function of DNA sequences simultaneously, so that functional elements can be identified by their evolutionary signatures, and at the same time, the detailed evolutionary histories of these elements can be reconstructed. Before completing his PhD at University of California Santa Cruz, Siepel worked for several years as a software developer. He has written widely used computer programs for the detection of evolutionarily conserved elements, gene prediction, phylogenetic modeling, and the detection of recombinant HIV sequences.

 

Luis von Ahn is focused on inventing novel techniques for utilizing the computational abilities of humans. He is working on CAPTCHA – the automated tests that humans can pass but that computer programs cannot. The applications are huge for security in computing. He is also working on The ESP Game – which is a game that helps catalog and tag images on the web to ultimately allow for more accurate image searches. To date The ESP Game has collected over 10 million labels for images on the Web. One of Luis’s other interests is anonymous communication and usable, effective security. Luis has been named a MacArthur Fellow for 2006-2011. He was also named one of Popular Science’s Brilliant Scientists of 2006.