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Vivek Ghosal

Department Head of Economics and Virginia and Lloyd W. Rittenhouse Professor
Dr. Ghosal is Professor and Department Head of Economics, and Virginia and Lloyd W. Rittenhouse Chaired Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences. He was the Acting Dean, School of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences, from January-July 2023. He is an Affiliated Faculty member at Rensselaer's Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies (CBIS), and at the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications (IDEA).Professor Ghosal's current research and policy interests include: (1) Artificial Intelligence Markets focusing on Big-Tech partnerships, antitrust and regulations; (2) Biopharmaceuticals markets focusing on innovation, pricing and FDA regulations; and (3) Antitrust laws and enforcement. Currently he teaches the course "Economics of Biotechnology and Medical Innovations."Before joining Rensselaer in 2016, he was the Mary and Richard Inman Chaired Professor at the School of Economics at Georgia Institute of Technology. At Georgia Tech., he was Director of the MS (2011-2016) and PhD (2012-2016) programs. Prior to his position at Georgia Tech., he was a Senior Economist at the Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice (1998-2001). In this position, he worked on mergers and acquisitions, horizontal and vertical market power, tying agreements, joint ventures, regulatory reform, and innovation and efficiency. Some of the markets he investigated include electricity, energy (nuclear, natural gas, oilfield drilling and services), information technology, media markets, and international mail services.Professor Ghosal has published two edited books: The Political Economy of Antitrust (Elsevier, 2007); and Reforming Rules and Regulations: Laws, Institutions and Implementation (MIT Press, 2010). He has published in peer-reviewed journals in Economics, Management, and Law & Economics, including: Review of Economics and Statistics; Journal of Law and Economics; Journal of Industrial Economics; International Journal of Industrial Organization; Research Policy; Small Business Economics; Managerial and Decision Economics; Business Strategy and the Environment; Journal of Competition Law & Economics; Review of Industrial Organization; Review of Law & Economics; Journal of Economics and Business; Illinois Law Review; China Economic Review; and Harvard Public Health Review. His research has also been published as book chapters by publishers such as: MIT Press; Stanford University Press; Elsevier Science; Edgar Elgar; Routledge; and Springer. His recent writing on "Big Tech Investments in AI Startups Do Not Raise Competitive Red Flags" appeared in the Big Tech-AI Investment Symposium published by ProMarket (University of Chicago). Dr. Ghosal's international appointments have included Visiting Professor (2010-2018) at the European Business School (Wiesbaden, Germany) where he conducted research and lectured on regulations and business strategy, with emphasis on environmental regulations, sustainability, and innovation in the automobile and other manufacturing industries. He was a Visiting Professor (2010-2016) at the joint Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, Paris) and Korea Development Institute School of Public Policy and Management (Seoul, South Korea) international program on regulatory reform and competition policy. In this position he provided executive education lectures and workshops to international public policy professionals. On topics related to antitrust, competition law and enforcement, regulations, and mergers and acquisitions, he has delivered executive education lectures in Taipei, Lima, Seoul, New Delhi, Amsterdam, and Tokyo. He has taught Summer graduate school workshops at the University of Amsterdam, Ludwig Maximilians University (Munich), and Central European University (Budapest).Professor Ghosal's grants, contacts and research have included industries such as: automobiles; high-speed rail; healthcare; transportation; information technology; telecommunications and media; energy and electricity; and paper & paperboard. His externally funded research grants have included issues related to: regional economic and business development; infrastructure investments; public-private partnerships; impact of environmental regulations; regulatory assessments; and innovation and efficiency. The organizations he has received funding from include: U.S. Department of Transportation; Georgia Department of Transportation; Sloan Foundation; Ragnar Soderberg's Foundation (Sweden); Woodruff Foundation; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, Paris); and Scripps Foundation.He worked as an expert with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, Paris, 2005-2012) on developing the Competition Assessment Toolkit which served as an international framework adopted by many countries for identifying and revising regulations and their impact on competition. As part of this OECD initiative, Dr. Ghosal traveled to several countries to present professional training workshops to national government agencies, public policy and regulatory professionals to help with implementation of the framework.Professor Ghosal has been a consultant for international organizations, governments, consulting firms and companies on issues related to antitrust, regulatory reform, business and economic modeling of markets, industry studies, and statistical and econometric modeling. He has provided project and expert reports, and testimony.

Radoslav Ivanov

Assistant Professor
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.

Deborah McGuinness

Tetherless World Senior Constellation Chair, Professor of Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Industrial and Systems Engineering
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.”

Bulent Yener

Associate Director, IDEA. Director, Data Science Research Center
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.

Bolek Szymanski

Claire & Roland Schmitt Distinguished Prof. of Computer Science and Director, Network Science and Technology Center (NeST)
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.

Christopher Carothers

Chief Scientist and Center Director
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

Liu Liu

Assistant Professor
Liu Liu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering and the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and an M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He directs the Efficient, Parallel, and Intelligent Computing (EPIC) Lab at RPI, focusing the research on Elastic AI Computing systems and architecture design. He is a recipient of NSF CAREER Award, Samsung Global Research Outreach Award, and Peter J Frenkel Fellowship from the Institute of Energy Efficiency at UCSB.

Jianjing Lin

Assistant Professor
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.

Shekhar Garde

Thomas R. Farino, Jr. ’67 and Patricia E. Farino Dean, School of Engineering and Elaine S. and Jack S. Parker Chaired Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Shekhar Garde is the Thomas R. Farino Jr. ’67 and Patricia E. Farino Dean of the School of Engineering and the Elaine S. and Jack S. Parker Chaired Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.  He received his bachelor's (University of Bombay, 1992) and PhD (University of Delaware, 1997) degrees in chemical engineering and was a director's fellow at Los Alamos National Labs (1997-1999), before joining Rensselaer in 1999. At RPI he was promoted to full Professor and named Elaine and Jack Parker Endowed Chair in Engineering in 2006, appointed Department Head of the Howard P. Isermann Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in 2007, and named Dean of Engineering in 2014. His research focuses on understanding the role of water in biological interactions.  He has published over 100 papers (cited 12,500+ times) and presented 150 invited talks at leading universities and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation NSF CAREER Award, Rensselaer Early Career Award, and was the 2011 Robert W. Vaughan Lecturer at CalTech. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineers and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Garde co-leads the award-winning Molecularium Project, which has produced digital dome and IMAX movies and a web-based gaming portal for children. In 2011, Garde was honored with the Explore-Discover-Imagine Award by the Children's Museum of Science and Technology in the Capital District (Albany), NY.