Prior to joining Rensellaer as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Radoslav was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with Dr. George Pappas and Dr. Rajeev Alur. Radoslav defended his PhD dissertation in 2017 at the University of Pennsylvania under the supervision of Dr. Insup Lee and Dr. James Weimer. His research lies broadly in the field of safe and secure autonomy. The natural application domains of his work are safety-critical cyber-physical systems (CPS) such as automotive CPS and medical CPS. The fields relevant to his research are safe autonomy, neural network verification, CPS security, control theory and sensor fusion.

Prof. Tomek Strzalkowski research interests span a wide spectrum of human language technology including computational linguistics and sociolinguistics, socio-behavioral computing, interactive information retrieval, question-answering, human-computer dialogue, serious games, social media analytics, formal semantics, and reversible grammars. He has directed research sponsored by IARPA, DARPA, ARL, AFRL, NSF, the European Commission, NSERC, as well as a number of industry-funded projects. He was involved in IBM’s Jeopardy! Challenge in advanced question answering. Dr. Strzalkowski has published over a hundred and fifty scientific papers, and is the editor of several books, including Advances in Open Domain Question Answering. He serves on the Editorial Board of the journal of Natural Language Engineering.   Prior to joining RPI, Dr. Strzalkowski was Professor of Computer Science at SUNY Albany. At SUNY, he was the founding Director of the Institute for Informatics, Logics, and Security Studies with research budget of more than $35 million. He came to SUNY from GE CRD where he was a Natural Language Group Leader and Principal Scientist. At GE, Dr. Strzalkowski directed projects on automated technical manuals, medical informatics, speech recognition, automated summarization, as well as multimedia processing including language and video. Before coming to GE, he was a research faculty at the Courant Institute of New York University, where he worked on applications of natural language processing to information retrieval.   Current projects include research into social dimensions of information spread online, internet ethnography, and building effective AI defenses against disinformation and exploitation of human socio-cognitive vulnerabilities online, including social engineering attacks. Some example projects include: GATOR: The Goal-oriented Autonomous Dialogue System. We develop a new type of human-machine dialogue system that uses deep learning technologies (such as transformers) to learn how to recognize and generate dialogue plans, i.e., semantic and pragmatic structures that represent one party’s goals and intentions, as well as the impact these are having on the other party. Unlike the current transformer-driven chatbots, the core learning is not to transform one language expression (input) into another language expression (response) but instead to construct a response plan that would properly address the plan in the input and the history of interaction. Consequently, the learning process takes three types of information: (1) the input utterance; (2) its semantic-pragmatic plan, i.e., the plan that was used to produce the utterance, and (3) the history of interaction up to this point. Furthermore, the cumulative history of the dialogue is not merely the memory of the utterances exchanged earlier, but it captures, in a condensed semantic form, the evolving state of the parties’ objectives as well as the emerging sociolinguistic behavioral patterns of both (all) parties. Personalized AutoNomous Agents Countering Social Engineering Attacks (PANACEA) protects online users against current and future forms of social engineering. PANACEA serves as an intermediary between attackers (human, automated, hybrid, coordinated) and the potential victim(s) they target. Depending upon the nature and source of communication, PANACEA either handles it autonomously, or allows the user to proceed with an exchange while monitoring the conversation and intervening as needed by (1) inserting or modifying users’ messages, (2) instructing the user how best to respond, while at the same time (3) initiating an investigation to identify the attacker. (DARPA ASED Program) COMETH (Computational Ethnography from Metaphors and Polarized Language). The objective of this project is to develop a methodology and accompanying software tools for constructing dynamic socio-behavioral models of communities based on online content that their members produce. A community can be defined by the set of salient concepts that its members recognize, along with the values they assign to them. The resulting causal models are then applied to derive culturally biased interpretations of novel information by prototyping the process by which such new information is adapted to fit into the community current model. (DARPA UGB) Social Convos: A New Approach to Modeling Information Diffusion in Social Media. In this project, we recast our understanding of all social media as a landscape of collectives, or “convos”: sets of users connected by a common interest in an (possibly evolving) information artifact, such as a repository in GitHub, a subreddit in Reddit or a group of hashtags in Twitter. Convos are represented by the collections of features that capture their internal social dynamics. Furthermore, convos are basis for modeling large and small internet-based communities as “hybrid organisms” that interact in various ways with one another and react collectively to external stimuli, including information and disinformation campaigns. (DARPA SocialSim)

Dr. Lin joined the Rensselaer faculty as an Assistant Professor of Economics in Fall 2017. Her research interests include topics in Health Economics, Industrial Organization, and Applied Econometrics.  She currently focuses on issues related to health information technology (IT) adoption, as well as how health IT impacts hospital financial and quality performance.

Jen Pazour is a Professor and the PhD Program Director in the department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY. Her research and teaching focus on the development and use of mathematical models to guide decision making for logistics and supply chain challenges. Modern supply chain systems need to fulfill a wide variety of requests quickly with little warning in small units to many dispersed locations at low costs. These characteristics are fundamentally different than yesterday’s demand that aggregated at given locations. In the face of this disconnect, her team's research thinks differently about how supply chain resources are acquired, managed, and allocated to fulfill customer requests. In doing so, her team's contributions span a diverse array of applications, including resource sharing platforms, peer-to-peer transportation systems, on-demand warehousing platforms, and crowdsourced order fulfillment systems, as well as facility logistics and transportation systems. Methodologically, they are modelers, whose core intellectual strength is in the development of mathematical and computational representations of sociotechnical systems and processes. Their research approach is to (1) create optimization models encompassing the primary system and decision trade-offs, (2) discover solution approaches and algorithms to efficiently solve the optimization models, (3) use the developed models and approaches to better understand the implications of the sociotechnical system’s design and operation, and then (4) through theoretical results, computational experiments, and statistical analysis provide managerial insights and policy recommendations. Her team has created a wide range of operations research tools, including integer linear programs, bi-level optimization formulations, queuing models, and analytical models. Jen is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, a Johnson & Johnson Women in STEM2D Scholars Award, a National Academies of Science Gulf Research Program Early-Career Fellowship, and a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research. She was awarded the Rensselaer Alumni Teaching Award, the IISE Logistics and Supply Chain Division Teaching Award, and the IISE Dr. Hamed K. Eldin Outstanding Early Career IE in Academia Award. She is an Associate Editor of Transportation Science, IISE Transactions, Military Operations Research, and OMEGA. She has served professional societies, for example, as a speaker and session organizer at the NAE Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, as the chair of the INFORMS professional recognition committee, chair of the INFORMS undergraduate operations research prize, chair of INFORMS TSL Facility Logistics SIG, the communications chair of the IISE Logistics and Supply Chain division and is on the IISE Transaction Social Media Team. She proudly holds three degrees in Industrial Engineering (a B.S. from South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, and a M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas). More information can be found at her research and teaching blog: http://jenpazour.wordpress.com/

Dr. Boleslaw K. Szymanski is the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at the Department of Computer Science and the Director of the ARL Social and Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from National Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland, in 1976. Dr. Szymanski published over four hundred scientific articles. He is a foreign member of the National Academy of Science in Poland, an IEEE Fellow and a member of the IEEE Computer Society, and Association for Computing Machinery for which he was National Lecturer. He received the Wiley Distinguished Faculty Award in 2003 and the Wilkes Medal of British Computer Society in 2009. His research interests cover the broad area of network science with current focus on social and computer networks.

I am a Professor in the Department of Computer Science with a courtesy appointment in ECSE Department. I have been serving as the founding Director of Data Science Research Center, and Associated Director of IDEA at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. I received MS. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science, both from Columbia University , in 1987 and 1994, respectively. Before joining RPI, I was a Member of the Technical Staff at the Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. My current research interests include applied machine learning in bioinformatics, medical informatics, and cyber security. I am a Fellow of the IEEE, a Senior Member of ACM, and a member of AAA.

Chris Carothers is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research interest are in massively parallel systems focusing on modeling and simulation systems of all sorts. Prof. Carothers is an NSF CAREER award winner and is currently active in the DOE Exascale Co-Design Program associated with designs for next generation exascale storage systems as well as the NSF PetaApps Program, and the Army Research Center's Mobile Network Modeling Institute

Curt Breneman was born in Santa Monica, California in 1956, and went on to earn a B.S. in Chemistry at UCLA in 1980 followed by a Ph.D. in Chemistry at UC Santa Barbara (with an emphasis on Physical Organic and Computational Chemistry) in 1987. Following two years of post-doctoral research at Yale University, Dr. Breneman joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and began a program in molecular recognition and computational chemistry based on his concept of "Transferable Atom Equivalents", or TAEs, as building blocks for describing the electronic and reactive character of molecules. Dr. Breneman currently holds the rank of Full Professor in the RPI Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and is the Director of the NIH RECCR Center. He later served as Head of the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Biology and now as Dean of the School of Science. The Breneman research group primarily specializes in the development of new molecular property descriptors and machine learning methods that can be applied to a diverse set of physical and biochemical problems. Of paramount interest are methods that can increase the information content of molecular descriptors, and machine learning techniques that can exploit this data for the creation of fully validated, predictive property models. Current application areas include pharmaceutical ADME prediction, virtual high-throughput screening of drug candidates, protein chromatography modeling (HIC and ion-exchange), as well as polymer property prediction.

Deborah McGuinness is a leading expert in knowledge representation and reasoning languages and systems and has worked in ontology creation and evolution environments for over 20 years. Most recently, McGuinness is best known for her leadership role in semantic web research, and for her work on explanation, trust, and applications of semantic web technology, particularly for scientific applications. “I am interested in making smart systems that help people and machines function better,” said McGuinness. “My slant on this work is to research, develop, and use semantic technologies that allow people and machines to represent, reason with, visualize, and explain information in ways that support understanding and (re)use.   My application areas cover a wide range of domain areas, but often in earth and space science informatics and health informatics.”

Director of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center for Biotechnology & Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS), conducting breakthrough research on bones, Deepak Vashishth, PhD, is working to redefine the role of a top tier research university: one that is engaged in public and private partnerships, involved in interdisciplinary research, and providing quality education, all to drive entrepreneurial, sustainable, socially responsible scientific discovery and technological innovation. Administrative leadership: Through his work as a University Center Director, previously as a School of Engineering Department head, and in professional societies he has successfully developed partnerships, Programs, and platforms, to drive translational scientific research across disciplines, sectors,and geographic boundaries. As Director of CBIS he oversees 70 resident and non-resident faculty (from each of the five Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute schools); engages with global partners in the public, private, and academic sectors; and fosters innovative graduate and undergraduate research and education initiatives. In his first two years as CBIS Director he has: envisioned and facilitated the creation of two transformative research centers (Bioimaging Center and Center for Translational Research in Medicine); led the development of an industry partners program to enhance technology transfer and commercialization; and broadened the scope of interdisciplinary research by combining biotechnology with architecture, humanities, and management. As Department Head of Biomedical Engineering (BME) in the School of Engineering at Rensselaer, in just 3 years he dramatically grew and strengthened the department: increased tenured faculty tenfold (1 to 10); added a senior endowed chair to its rank; and it became home to 7 NSF career awardees and recipient of more than 10 NIH RO1 awards (from 2 in 2009). As a committee member of the Orthopaedic Research Society, he developed and facilitated a “Symposium in Translational Medicine” designed to accelerate the transition of discoveries from lab bench to bedside by bridging the gap between clinical, basic science & engineering, government agencies (FDA) and industry. Research leadership: Dr. Vashishth’s research interests are in the area of biomolecular science and engineering of extracellular matrix with particular emphasis on diagnosis and treatment of osteoporosis and bone tissue engineering. His collaborative, interdisciplinary bone research is redefining how osteoporosis will be diagnosed and treated. In 2012 he was elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) for contributions to the understanding of how both age and collagen‐modification affect bone fragility (cited over 1000 times). AIMBE fellows represent the top 2% of the medical and biological engineering community in the world and are elected based on nomination and vote by AIMBE fellows (http://aimbe.org/college-of-fellows/cof-1479/). He has opened new avenues for diagnosing and treating osteoporosis by developing a new technique to identify bone proteome from nanoscale samples. The process also has been applied for analyzing precious fossils. He is bringing his breakthrough research to market, co-founding a company (Orthograft plc), to produce the acellular biomimetic grafts for bone repair. Professor Vashishth and his research group have published over 200 peer-reviewed journal publications and conference proceedings in top journals including PNAS, Molecular and Cellular Proteomics, Plos One and others. His work presented in the form of over 100 invited and contributed lectures has been cited as a “New Hope for Osteoporosis Patients” and “Secret Formula for Bone Strength” in mainstream media. Working in collaboration with others, his research group has identified new structural roles for bone proteins and developed new biomimickry-based strategies for tissue engineering scaffolds. In addition to being a Fellow of and active in the AIMBE, he serves as a member of the National Institutes of Health study section on Skeletal Biology and Skeletal Regeneration. He is a board member of the Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials and a regular reviewer for other federal and international funding agencies, private foundations and university grants, and journals. He also is a member of the Biomedical Engineering Society, American Society of Bone and Mineral Research and the Orthopaedic Research Society. Educational leadership: Fundamentally focused on education, he is preparing the next generation of researchers and the “faculty of the future” by infusing undergraduate and graduate programs with a more interdisciplinary, collaborative, global perspective on sustainable, translational scientific research. In recognition of his dedication to education, he has won Rensselaer awards for outstanding and innovative classroom teaching including the Class of 1951 Outstanding Teaching award. As CBIS Director, he established new global partnerships, redesigned graduate training programs, and developed a new course, all designed to prepare the “faculty of the future,” focused on sustainable collaborative interdisciplinary research and technology transfer and commercialization. As BME department head (2009-2013): expanded the graduate program three-fold (from 20 to 60 students), attracted more highly qualified graduate students, and promoted early success (National fellowships). He overhauled curriculum, to enhance learning and to improve the undergraduate experience, by reducing class size and providing hands-on education in a technologically connected classroom. Background: He earned his B. Eng with honors from Malaviya National Institute of Technology (India), MS from West Virginia University (USA) and PhD from the University of London (UK). He then conducted post-doctoral research at the Bone and Joint Center, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Henry Ford Hospital before joining Rensselaer as an Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering in 1999.