Karrie Karahalios
Email: kkarahal@illinois.edu
An American computer scientist and professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is noted for her work on the impact of computer science on people and society, analyses of social media, and algorithm auditing. She is co-founder of the Center for People and Infrastructures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her bachelor’s degree at MIT in EECS in 1994, ME in EECS in 1995, S.M. in Media Arts and Sciences in 1997, and a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences in 2004. Karahalios joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2004, her research focuses on social media and the impact of computing on society, including algorithmic bias and methods to detect and analyze such bias, a field termed “algorithm auditing”. Karahalios was one of the recipients of the National Science Foundation CAREER Awards in 2007, of the A. Richard Newton Breakthrough Research Award in 2008, and of the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowships in 2010. She was named a University Scholar at the University of Illinois in 2019. She has received Best Paper awards for publications in the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in 2008, 2009, 2015, and 2017.
Anita Say Chan
Email: achan@illinois.edu
An Associate Professor in the School of Information Sciences and Department of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and director of the Community Data Clinic. Her research, teaching, and community service interests include globalization and digital cultures, innovation networks and the “periphery”, science and technology studies in global contexts, and hybrid pedagogies in building digital literacies. She received her PhD in 2008 from the MIT Doctoral Program in History; Anthropology; and Science, Technology, and Society. Her first book the competing imaginaries of global connection and information technologies in network-age Peru, Networking Peripheries: Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism was released by MIT Press in 2014. Her research has been awarded support from the Center for the Study of Law & Culture at Columbia University’s School of Law and the National Science Foundation, and she has held postdoctoral fellowships at The CUNY Graduate Center’s Committee on Globalization & Social Change, and at Stanford University’s Introduction to Humanities Program. She is a Fiddler Innovation Faculty Fellow with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Indranil Gupta (Indy)
Email: indy@illinois.edu
A Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Indy leads the Distributed Protocols Research Group and the BOCCE Cloud Center in the CS Department at UIUC. He works on distributed protocols, with specific focus on large-scale distributed systems such as datacenters and cloud computing systems. Indranil is recipient of the the NSF CAREER award in 2005, the Junior Xerox Award for Faculty Research in 2008, the CAS/Beckman Fellowship in 2009, and the Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership Faculty Fellowship in 2010. He has won Best Paper Awards at IEEE/ACM CCGrid 2017, IEEE IC2E 2016, IEEE ICAC 2015 and BigMine 2012. Indranil received teaching recognition in the UIUC “List of Teachers ranked as Excellent” multiple times since 2003. He served as General Chair of ACM PODC 2007; PC co-chair at HotCloud 2018, IC2E 2017, ICCAC 2016, DeMIST 2016, ACM/IFIP/Usenix Middleware 2010, IEEE SASO 2010, StoDiS 2005; Track chair at ICDCS 2015; and Associate Track Vice Chair at ICDCS 2008. Previously, Indranil received his PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University in 2004. Recently, during 2011-2012 he spent an awesome year as a full-time Google employee (Visiting Scientist at Google, Mountain View). In the past, he has also worked in IBM Research (T.J. Watson) and Microsoft Research (Cambridge, UK). Indranil obtained his Bachelor of Technology (Computer Science) from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Chennai/Madras, in 1998. He is originally from Hyderabad (India), where he was schooled in St. Patrick’s H.S., HPS(R), and LFJC. He has also been a Gold Medalist at India’s National Physics Olympiad, and recipient of India’s NTSE Scholarship. Since 2005, Indranil has hosted a music radio show called “East of Zero” on the community radio station WEFT 90.1 FM in Champaign, Illinois.
Camille Cobb
Email: camillec@illinois.edu
An assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Camille’s research is in the area of Usable Security and Privacy, broadly aiming to help avoid or mitigate harms of digital technologies. She believes that understanding how new technologies affect people is an important step toward reshaping technology designs to better support all users, advocating for policies that discourage exploitation, and educating users. Camille earned her Ph.D. in 2019 from the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science at the University of Washington, where she was advised by Yoshi Kohno and Alexis Hiniker. She subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher in CyLab, the Carnegie Mellon Security and Privacy Institute. Her work has touched on security and privacy topics including smart homes, social media, and online dating.
Hari Sundaram
Email: hs1@illinois.edu
Hari Sundaram is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He is interested in the role that computing can play in empowering individuals to make better decisions. The research in his group contributes to: applied machine learning (e.g., recommender systems for better choices), network science (e.g., how platform rules can induce strategic behavior), human-computer interaction (e.g., systems to elicit truthful preferences; understanding if online markets discriminate), and mechanism design (e.g., the design of rules to incentivize pro-social behavior). The research from his group has won awards from the ACM and IEEE societies and the American Academy of Advertising. He is a distinguished member of the ACM, and a senior member of the IEEE.
Lav Varshney
Email: varshney@illinois.edu
He is a professor of engineering, computer science, and neuroscience at the University of Illinois, where he conducts scholarly research, technological innovation, teaching, and broad public engagement. He works with Brookhaven National Laboratory on computing for national security. He has published widely in core areas of information theory and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as applications in climate, sustainability, food, public health, medicine, creativity, telecommunications, semiconductors, and infrastructure. As an entrepreneur, he has been chief scientist of startup companies: one using AI to optimize wastewater treatment, another using AI in social music co-creativity platforms, and a third making food systems more resilient and flavorful. He holds a B.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.