Dr. Magdon-Ismail has been a Professor of Computer Science since 2000. After degrees at Yale and Caltech, Dr. Magdon-Ismail was a research scholar at Caltech before joining Rensselaer as Assistant Professor of Computer Science. His interests are in decision making from data in complex systems, including machine learning, computational finance networked systems and quantum computing. He enjoys poker, bridge, squash, tennis and badminton. For more details, please visit his web page.

Lydia Manikonda is an Assistant Professor in the Lally School of Management. Her research interests lie in developing robust, goal-centric intelligent models that are capable of learning and reasoning with complex, real-world data drawn from the Web. In particular, how these models can be used to address critical challenges in user privacy, public health (including addictions, dietetics, and maternal health), and finance (with an emphasis on crowdfunding). Within this broader scope, she also is studying how #generativeAI is actively shaping user behavior online. The rise of #genAI systems has introduced new privacy concerns, altered patterns of interactions both online and offline, and its impact on mental health. Understanding and integrating these behavioral, ethical, and psychological dimensions into metacognitive tasks is a central aspect of her work, ensuring that frameworks remain both effective and adaptable in dynamic environments. Methodologically, her research tackles challenges associated with handling unstructured and messy data (especially, natural language text), and integrating diverse sources of information. So far, her research work has received several media mentions, a best SPC and reviewer awards at AAAI ICWSM 2025 and 2016 respectively and an outstanding demonstration award at AAAI ICAPS 2014. Lydia received her PhD in Computer Science from Arizona State University in 2019 and MS (by Thesis) and B.Tech both in Computer Science and Engineering from IIIT-Hyderabad. More information about her research and publications can be found here: website (https://lmanikon.github.io/) or Google Scholar (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xB5PgNgAAAAJ)

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.

Hull joined RPI in January 2008 to assume the positions of the Head of the Materials Science and Engineering Department and the Henry Burlage Professor of Engineering. Prior to that he spent about a decade at Bell Laboratories in the Physics Research Division, and twelve years at the University of Virginia, where he was the Director of an NSF MRSEC Center and Director of the UVA Institute for Nanoscale and Quantum Science. He received his PhD in Materials Science from Oxford University in 1983. Hull is highly active in engineering and materials science societies and professional groups. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Materials Research Society, and in 1997 served as president of the Materials Research Society. He has also chaired a Gordon Research Conference on Thin Films, and chaired the Committee of Visitors for the National Science Foundation’s Division of Materials Research. Within the realms of materials and nanoscience, Hull’s research focuses on the relationships between structure and property in electronic materials, fundamental mechanisms of thin film growth, and the self-assembly of nanoscale structures. Other areas of interest include degradation modes in electronic and optoelectronic devices, the properties of dislocations in semiconductors, nanoscale fabrication techniques, nanoscale tomographic reconstruction techniques, development of new nanoelectronic architectures, and the theory and application of electron and ion beams.  

Lirong Xia is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Prior to joining RPI in 2013, he was a CRCS fellow and NSF CI Fellow at the Center for Research on Computation and Society at Harvard University. He received his PhD in Computer Science and MA in Economics from Duke University. His research focuses on the intersection of computer science and microeconomics, in particular computational social choice, game theory, mechanism design, and prediction markets. He is an associate editor of Mathematical Social Sciences and is on the editorial board of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, a Simons-Berkeley Research Fellowship, and was named as one of "AI's 10 to watch 2015" by IEEE Intelligent Systems.

In her current art work and multimedia research, Patricia Search designs multimedia installations that explore the aesthetics of space, time, and action in computer interface design. “I work with digital media and create interactive installations that highlight ways to use diverse media, exploration, physical interaction, and social discourse to create immersive experiences for online communication,” Search said. “These multisensory environments create perceptual dichotomies that juxtapose realism and fantasy, logic and emotion, continuity and transition. The installations incorporate non-Western perspectives of space, time, and action inspired by indigenous cultures, resulting in innovative ways to use interaction design to define a sense of place. As a result, my research is expanding the syntax of experience design and shaping new dimensions in relational aesthetics through the integration of physical and virtual environments. In these installations, multiple viewers use the interaction with physical and virtual elements, social discourse, and memory to define the aesthetics of the experience and a sense of place.” Patricia Search has had over 40 solo exhibitions and multimedia installations of her art throughout the United States, including 11 in New York City, as well as exhibitions in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, France, Germany and Taiwan. She has also participated in over 150 group exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Germany, Portugal, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Greece, China, and Japan. She was awarded a Fellowship in Computer Art from the New York Foundation for the Arts and received a Fulbright Senior Specialists Grant to work on multimedia projects with two universities in Australia. In 2005, she received the Creative Achievement Award from the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA), and in 2010, she was awarded the IVLA James G. Sucy Distinguished Service Award. She was President of IVLA from 2009-2010. She received the best paper award for her research from the World Conference on Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia, and she received the IVLA Editors’ Choice Award for best papers in 2003 and 2007. Her art has been published in numerous journals and three television documentaries including a PBS documentary. Patricia Search served as Co-Editor of the international Journal of Visual Literacy and was a contributing editor for the International Journal of Learning for two years. She has co-edited five books on visual literacy research. She served on the Board of Directors of the International Visual Literacy Association and the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (ISAST).