Appendix B

Biographical Sketches of Presenters

(In alphabetical order by last name)

Anthony Bak, Ph.D., is head of artificial intelligence (AI) implementation for Palantir Technologies, where he works with customers and internal teams on building AI-powered workflows. He is also currently serving on the National AI Advisory Committee Law Enforcement Subcommittee. Prior to Palantir, he led research and development (R&D) at an AI platform startup that focused on unsupervised machine learning (ML) methods. He has a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and has held research positions at Stanford University, the American Institute of Mathematics, and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics.

Steve Chien, Ph.D., is a JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) fellow, senior research scientist, and head of the Artificial Intelligence Group at NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) JPL, California Institute of Technology. In this capacity, he has led the deployment of AI software to a wide range of missions and is currently supporting the development of an onboard scheduler for the Mars 2020 rover mission as well as formulating future AI-driven space mission concepts.

Dr. Chien has received numerous awards for these efforts, including the Lew Allen Award for Excellence (1995); has been recognized in the NASA Software of the Year competition (1999, 1999, 2005, and 2011); and has received NASA medals for his work in AI for space (1997,

2000, 2007, and 2015). In 2011, he was awarded the inaugural AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) Intelligent Systems Award, for his contributions to spacecraft autonomy.

Dr. Chien has supported the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Defense Science Board studies on Autonomy. From 2018 to 2021, he was a congressionally appointed member of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. Since 2023, he has served on the Army Science Board. Dr. Chien is also active in the research community and is a founder of the International Workshop on Planning and Scheduling for Space and the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, and has served as a councilor for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).

Peter Clark, Ph.D., is a senior research director and founding member of the Allen Institute for AI (AI2). He leads AI2’s Aristo Project, aiming to build the next generation of systems that can systematically reason, explain, and continually improve over time, in particular in scientific domains. In 2019 the Aristo team made headlines with the first AI system to pass an eighth-grade science exam.

Dr. Clark received his Ph.D. in computer science in 1991; has published more than 250 papers; and has received several awards, including three best paper awards (AAAI, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, and AKBC [Automated Knowledge Base Construction]), a Boeing Associate Technical Fellowship (2004), and senior member status at AAAI.

I. Glenn Cohen, Ph.D., is deputy dean of Harvard Law School and one of the world’s leading experts on the intersection of bioethics (also called “medical ethics”) and the law, as well as health law. His current projects relate to big data, medical AI, health information technologies, mobile health, reproduction/reproductive technology, research ethics, organ transplantation, rationing in law and medicine, health policy, U.S. Food and Drug Administration law, translational medicine, and medical tourism.

Dr. Cohen is the author of more than 200 articles and chapters and the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than 18 books. His work has appeared in or been covered in venues such as PBS, NPR, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Mother Jones, the New York Times, and the New Republic.

Steve Finkbeiner, Ph.D., is the director of the Center for Systems and Therapeutics and the Taube/Koret Center for Neurodegenerative Disease

Research at Gladstone Institutes, and is a professor of neurology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). The long-term goal of his research is to understand how neuronal activity leads to learning and memory. His lab has developed cell-based models of Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), and more. They have invented new tools, such as robotic microscopy, and adapted AI to unravel cause and effect in complex mechanisms and gain insights from data that elude comprehension by the unaided human brain.

Dr. Finkbeiner has received awards from the UCSF Graduate Student Association for Outstanding Faculty Mentorship, the Hereditary Disease Foundation’s Lieberman Award and the Taube/Koret Prize for Outstanding Work on Huntington’s Disease, the Award for Outstanding Research Achievement from Nature Biotechnology, the Javits Neuroscience Investigator Award from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and the Leslie Gehry Brenner Prize for Innovation in Science from the Hereditary Disease Foundation.

Carla Gomes, Ph.D., is the Ronald C. and Antonia V. Nielsen Professor of Computing and Information Science and director of the Institute for Computational Sustainability at Cornell University, and co-director of the Cornell University AI for Science Institute. Her research area is AI with a focus on large-scale constraint reasoning, optimization, and ML. Recently, she has become deeply immersed in research on scientific discovery for a sustainable future and, more generally, in research in the new field of computational sustainability. Dr. Gomes was the lead principal investigator (PI) of two National Science Foundation (NSF) Expeditions in Computing awards. She has authored or co-authored more than 200 publications, which have appeared in venues spanning Nature, Science, and a variety of conferences and journals in AI and computer science, including five best paper awards.

Dr. Gomes was named the “most influential Cornell professor” by a Merrill Presidential Scholar (2020). Dr. Gomes was also the recipient of the AAAI Feigenbaum Prize (2021) for high-impact contributions to the field of AI and of the 2022 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)/AAAI Allen Newell Award for contributions bridging computer science and other disciplines. She is a fellow of the AAAI, ACM, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Dr. Gomes received a Ph.D. in computer science in AI from the University of Edinburgh.

Mark Greaves, Ph.D., is the executive director of AI2050. An initiative of Schmidt Futures, AI2050 supports exceptional people working on key opportunities and hard problems that are critical to get right for society to benefit from AI. Before joining Schmidt Futures, he was a senior leader in AI and data analytics within the National Security Directorate at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where he created and managed large research programs in AI for science and national security on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy. Prior to this, he was director of knowledge systems at Vulcan Inc., the private asset management company for Paul Allen, where he led global research teams in question-answering textbooks, large knowledge graphs, semantic web, and crowdsourcing. Previously, he was director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) Joint Logistics Technology Office and program manager in DARPA’s Information Exploitation Office. At DARPA, he directed national research programs in semantic web technology, formal ontology specification, logistics and supply chain control technologies, and the application of software agent technology to problems of distributed control of complex systems-of-systems.

Dr. Greaves was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service for his contributions to U.S. national security while serving at DARPA. He holds a B.A. in cognitive science from Amherst College, an M.S. in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University.

Susan Gregurick, Ph.D., was appointed associate director for data science and director of the Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2019. Under her leadership, the ODSS leads the implementation of the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science through scientific, technical, and operational collaboration with NIH’s institutes, centers, and offices. She was instrumental in the creation of the ODSS in 2018 and served as a senior advisor to the office until being named to her current position. She was previously the division director for biophysics, biomedical technology, and computational biosciences at the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Prior to joining NIH in 2013, she was a program director in the Office of Biological and Environmental Research at the Department of Energy.

Before beginning a career of government service, Dr. Gregurick was a professor of computational chemistry at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research interests included dynamics of large

biological macromolecules, and her areas of expertise are computational biology, high-performance computing (HPC), neutron scattering, and bioinformatics. Dr. Gregurick received her undergraduate degree in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Michigan and her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Maryland.

Shirley Ho, Ph.D., is an American astrophysicist and ML expert, currently at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at Flatiron Institute and at New York University (NYU) and Carnegie Mellon University. She also has a visiting appointment at Princeton University. A cited expert in cosmology, deep learning, and its applications in astrophysics and data science, her interests include developing and deploying deep learning techniques to better understand our universe and other astrophysical phenomena. She significantly contributed to the development of several fields, including cosmic microwave background, cosmological models, dark energy, dark matter, spatial distribution of galaxies and quasars, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, cosmological simulations, and applications of ML to cosmology and astrophysics.

More recently, Dr. Ho is noted for her work in leading the early adoption of AI in astrophysics. In particular, her team at Carnegie Mellon University was the first to apply three-dimensional (3D) convolutional neural networks in astrophysics; the same team then accelerated astrophysical simulations with deep learning for the first time. Her current team at the Center for Computational Astrophysics and Princeton University is the first to combine symbolic regression and neural networks to recover physical laws from observations directly. Her team also led the first development and deployment of a deep learning–accelerated simulation-based inference framework for large spectroscopic surveys. Her team further accelerated physical simulations ranging from fluid dynamics simulations to planetary dynamics simulations using modern deep learning techniques, and developed techniques in interpretable ML for science.

Deborah Johnson, Ph.D., is the Anne Shirley Carter Olsson Professor of Applied Ethics, Emeritus. Although she remains active at the University of Virginia (UVA), she retired several years ago from teaching in the Department of Engineering and Society in UVA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. Over the course of her career, Dr. Johnson’s research and teaching have focused on the ethical implications of computer and information technologies, engineering ethics, and technology policy. Her most

recent books include Engineering Ethics: Contemporary and Enduring Debates (Yale University Press, 2020) and an anthology of readings co-authored with Jameson Wetmore, Technology and Society: Building our Sociotechnical Future (MIT Press, 2021). Dr. Johnson’s research has addressed many of the ethical issues associated with computers and information technology, from privacy and surveillance to humanoid robots and deepfakes. Accountability is a persistent theme in her writing, and most recently she has focused on accountability and AI.

Over the years, Dr. Johnson has received more than a dozen grants from NSF. In recognition of her contributions, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Philosophy and Technology (2021), the Covey Award from the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (2018), and the Joseph Weizenbaum Award for life-long contributions to information and computer ethics from the International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (2015).

Subbarao Kambhampati, Ph.D., is a professor at the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University (ASU) and a former president of AAAI. He studies fundamental problems in planning and decision-making, motivated in particular by the challenges of human-aware AI systems. Prior to joining ASU, he was a research associate with the Center for Design Research and the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University.

Dr. Kambhampati has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the NSF Research Initiation Award (1992), NSF Young Investigator Award (1994), College of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award (2001–2002), IBM Faculty Award (2004), and multiple Google Research Awards (2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016). In 2004, he was named a fellow of AAAI; in 2011, he was selected by ASU students to give a Last Lecture; in 2017, he was elected a fellow of the AAAS; in 2018, he was named a distinguished alumnus by the Computer Science Department of the University of Maryland, College Park; in 2019, he was named a fellow of the ACM; and in 2022, the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, recognized him as a distinguished alumnus. Within his department, he has been recognized both for his teaching (Teacher of the Year, 2012) and research (Best Researcher, 2005, 2017). Dr. Kambhampati completed his B.Tech. in electrical engineering at IIT Madras in 1983, and received his M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1989) in computer science from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Andrey Kanaev, Ph.D., serves as a permanent program director at NSF’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure. In this role, he is responsible for nationwide development of HPC cyberinfrastructure, development of advanced computing programs, and implementation of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate’s large infrastructure projects. Prior to joining NSF, Dr. Kanaev served as a science director at the U.S. Office of Naval Research Global (ONRG; London, United Kingdom), where his duties included searching for innovative international science and technology; delivering technical awareness; and establishing relationships with scientific research communities across Europe, the Middle East, and Australia. The scope of the programs and activities initiated and supported in these geographical areas encompassed scientific fields of information processing, sensing, neuromorphic and quantum computing, communications, photonics, optics, and nanoscience. Dr. Kanaev’s research experience was gained during 13 years of service as a research physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, leading programs on image processing and optical sensing; 3 years of service as a research associate at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; 1 year of service as a scientist at Polymath Inc., working in photonics; as well as 1 year of service as a scientist at Corning Inc., performing research in optical communications.

Dr. Kanaev received his Ph.D. and M.S. in plasma physics from the University of Rochester in 2002 and 1997, respectively; he received his M.S. in solid state physics and B.S. in physics from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (National Research Nuclear University) in 1993 and 1991, respectively.

Hiroaki Kitano, Ph.D., is the chief technology officer of Sony Group Corporation and professor at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate School. His work at Carnegie Mellon University to build large-scale, data-driven spoken language translation systems on massively parallel computers led to the Computers and Thought Award from the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 1993. In the early 1990s, he proposed an international grand challenge program in AI and robotics, known as RoboCup, aiming to develop a team of fully autonomous humanoids to win the world championship in soccer by 2050.

His research at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc., and at the California Institute of Technology gave rise to the field of systems biology, merging biology and systems science. After over two decades of systems biology research, he proposed a new grand challenge, the Nobel

Turing Challenge, to develop a highly autonomous AI scientist that can make major scientific discoveries. The challenge also poses the question of whether such an AI scientist behaves like a human scientist or demonstrates a very different form of intelligence.

Dr. Kitano is the founding president of the RoboCup Federation, president of IJCAI (2009–2011), and a member of scientific advisory boards for numerous academic institutions, including the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. He is a recipient of the Nature Award for Creative Mentoring in Science (2009) and a fellow of the AAAI. He was an invited artist for La Biennale di Venezia (2000) and for the Workspheres exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2001).

Mario Krenn, Ph.D., is a research group leader of the Artificial Scientist Lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. He earned his Ph.D. in quantum physics from the University of Vienna, in the group of Nobel Prize winner Anton Zeilinger. Subsequently, he worked at the University of Toronto and Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence before he started his own group. His work focuses on AI-inspired and AI-augmented science, and how one can use algorithms in a more “creative” way.

To make progress, he aims to understand what humans mean by crucial scientific concepts such as surprising, creativity, understanding, or interest. He has created AIs for designing quantum experiments and hardware and inspiring novel ideas for quantum technologies. He also built knowledge graphs from millions of papers and combines them with ML to predict and suggest personalized future research questions and ideas. In that sense, his group aims to use the machine as a source of inspiration to accelerate scientific progress.

Hod Lipson, Ph.D., is a roboticist who works in the areas of AI and digital manufacturing. He and his students design and build robots that do what robots are least expected to do: self-replicate, self-reflect, ask questions, and even be creative. His research asks questions such as the following: Can robots ultimately design and make other robots? Can machines be curious and creative? Will robots ever be truly self-aware? Answers to these questions can help illuminate life’s big mysteries. An award-winning researcher, teacher, and communicator, Dr. Lipson shares the beauty of robotics through his books, essays, public lectures, and radio and television appearances. He is a professor of mechanical engineering and data science at Columbia University, where he directs the Creative Machines Lab, which

pioneers new ways to make machines that create and machines that are creative.

Before joining Columbia University in 2015, Dr. Lipson spent 14 years as a professor at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. in 1999 from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, followed by a postdoc at Brandeis University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His work on self-aware and self-replicating robots challenges conventional views of robotics and has received widespread media coverage. He has also pioneered open-source 3D printing, as well as electronics 3D printing, bio-printing, and food printing. He has co-authored more than 300 publications that received more than 45,000 citations to date. He has co-founded four companies and is a frequent keynote speaker at both industry and academic events.

Peter Madrid, Ph.D., is a co-founder and head of scientific development at Synfini, Inc., a biotech company focused on uniting physical and virtual chemistry to accelerate drug discovery. Prior to Synfini, he was vice president of the Biosciences Division at SRI International, a nonprofit research institute, where he led a group of 60 scientists focused on technology innovations in preclinical drug discovery. While at SRI, Dr. Madrid was the PI on a $20 million DARPA Accelerated Molecular Discovery program, where he led a team of AI researchers and drug hunters to create an integrated closed-loop discovery platform for pharmaceutical compounds. He was also a co-PI on two other DARPA programs: Make-It, focused on automating chemical synthesis, and FoldF(x), a program to automate the discovery of new types of biologically active polymer molecules. He also has extensive experience leading medicinal chemistry programs that have delivered multiple preclinical candidate drugs, particularly in the areas of infectious disease and oncology.

Dr. Madrid has been funded by the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop antibacterial and antiviral drugs with novel mechanisms. Dr. Madrid received his Ph.D. in chemistry and chemical biology from UCSF, and his B.S. in chemistry from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Gary Marcus, Ph.D., is a leading voice in AI. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience.

An emeritus professor of psychology and neural science at NYU, he is the author of five books, including The Algebraic Mind, Kluge, The Birth of the Mind, and the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero. He has often contributed to the New Yorker, Wired, and the New York Times. His most recent book, Rebooting AI, with Ernest Davis, is one of Forbes’s “7 Must-Read Books about Artificial Intelligence.”

Vukosi Marivate, Ph.D., is an associate professor of computer science and holds the ABSA UP Chair of Data Science at the University of Pretoria. He specializes in developing ML and AI methods to extract insights from data, with a particular focus on the intersection of ML/AI and natural language processing (NLP). His research is dedicated to improving the methods, tools, and availability of data for local or low-resource languages. As the leader of the Data Science for Social Impact research group in the Computer Science Department, he is interested in using data science to solve social challenges. He has worked on projects related to science, energy, public safety, and utilities, among others. Prof. Marivate is a co-founder and chief technology officer of Lelapa AI, an African startup focused on AI for Africans by Africans. He is a chief investigator on the Masakhane NLP project, which aims to develop NLP technologies for African languages. He is also a co-founder of Deep Learning Indaba, the leading grassroots ML and AI conference on the African continent that aims to empower and support African researchers and practitioners in the field.

Benji Maruyama, Ph.D., is a principal materials research engineer in the Air Force Research Laboratory, Materials and Manufacturing Directorate; the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Materials and Manufacturing Directorate liaison to the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Autonomy Capability Team; and autonomous materials lead for RX. Dr. Maruyama pioneered ARES, the Autonomous Research System for materials development, with the aim of speeding the research process by orders of magnitude. His group has built ARES robots to study the synthesis and processing science of carbon nanotubes and worked with others for chemistry and additive manufacturing ARES robots. Dr. Maruyama is the primary point of contact for carbon materials for the Materials and Manufacturing Directorate. His interests include carbon nanomaterials; energy storage; field emission; and carbon, polymer, and metal matrix composites. He is currently involved in the study of the origins of chiral growth for carbon nanotubes, catalyst development, and larger issues in the rate of scientific advancement.

Amy McGovern, Ph.D., is a Lloyd G. and Joyce Austin Presidential Professor in the School of Computer Science and in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. Dr McGovern is also the director of the NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography. Her research focuses on developing and applying trustworthy AI and ML methods primarily for severe weather phenomena.

Dr. McGovern received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2002 and was a senior postdoctoral research associate at the University of Massachusetts until joining the University of Oklahoma in 2005. She received her M.S. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (1998) and her B.S. (honors) from Carnegie Mellon University (1996). Dr. McGovern is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society.

Patrick Rose, Ph.D., is innovation manager at the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, SPRIN-D. Since December 2022, he has been building an investment portfolio with an emphasis on biotechnology. Previously, he was the inaugural science director for Synthetic Biology at ONRG, where he built the first synthetic biology-focused global investment portfolio in early research. Later, he was named chief scientist at ONRG and was responsible for all science directors and their investments in the Americas, Africa, Middle East, and Europe. While working for ONRG, he was also selected to be the inaugural program manager for the U.S. Department of Defense Bioindustrial Manufacturing Innovation Institute, later selected to be BioMADE. He led the team to establish the institute and manage its operations the first 3 years, while executing the strategic biomanufacturing priorities for the U.S. Department of Defense Manufacturing Technologies Office.

Dr. Rose has spent most of his career looking at the potential of technology and its risks and consequences from various perspectives. He holds a Ph.D. in microbiology from Oregon Health and Science University and is an inaugural alumnus of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Program.

Tapio Schneider, Ph.D., is the Theodore Y. Wu Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, a senior research scientist at NASA JPL, and a visiting researcher at Google. His research focuses on how the climate of Earth and other planets comes

about and may change, for example, by changes in atmospheric circulation or cloud cover. To improve climate predictions, he is currently leading the Climate Modeling Alliance, or CliMA, which is developing next-generation climate models that use AI tools to fuse observations with process models of the Earth system.

Dr. Schneider was named one of the Top 20 Scientists under 40 by Discover Magazine, was a David and Lucile Packard fellow and Alfred P. Sloan research fellow, was a recipient of the Rosenstiel Award of the University of Miami and the James R. Holton Award of the American Geophysical Union, and is a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Chitra Sivanandam, Ph.D., is a co-founder of Rohirrim, Inc., a business-to-business Software-as-a-Service business developing generative AI products for enterprise customers. She has nearly 25 years of experience supporting the U.S. Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and other federal customers, having served in leadership roles across the industry to include SAIC, RGi, Blackbird Technologies, Exelis Geospatial, In-Q-Tel, and Lockheed Martin. In her spare time, she runs the Craft of Brewing, a startup microbrewery, with her husband. Her expertise ranges from analytics, AI/ML, HPC, and modeling and simulation on the technical side to strategy, tech scouting and diligence, and talent development on the business side.

Ms. Sivanandam graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1998 with a B.S. in imaging science and obtained an M.B.A. from Wharton (University of Pennsylvania) in 2006.

Lynda Stuart, Ph.D., is a physician and scientist, with more than 20 years of experience in immunology, global health, and product development. Before joining the Institute for Protein Design, she was a deputy director in global health at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (2013–2022), where she oversaw the discovery and development of vaccines, biologics, and antibody therapies to address urgent global health challenges. Notably, Dr. Stuart led the foundation’s COVID-19 discovery and translational vaccine response efforts, managing a large portfolio of COVID-19 and pan-coronavirus vaccine candidates. During this time, she collaborated closely with the Institute for Protein Design to guide the development and approval of SKYCovione, a royalty-free World Health Organization prequalified vaccine for COVID-19. Additionally, Dr. Stuart built the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Discovery Collabo-

ratory, a multi-institutional R&D network established to enable access to cutting-edge technologies to help investigators around the world advance global health solutions. From 2022 to 2023, she was the vice president of infectious disease at the mRNA company BioNTech.

Dr. Stuart holds a Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh and an M.D. from the University of Cambridge and the University of London. She was faculty at Harvard Medical School and served on the Massachusetts General Hospital Executive Committee for Research and was an affiliate of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

Manuela Veloso, Ph.D., is the head of JPMorgan Chase AI Research and Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emerita at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was faculty in the Computer Science Department and previously head of the Machine Learning Department. She has served as president of the AAAI, and she is co-founder and a past president of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, AAAS, and ACM, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Her research interests include AI, autonomous robots, learning agents, and AI in finance.

Dr. Veloso has a licenciatura degree in electrical engineering and an M.Sc. in electrical and computer engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, an M.A. in computer science from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University. She has a doctorate honoris causa from the Université de Bordeaux, France, and a doctorate honoris causa from the Universidade Católica of Portugal.

Aisha Walcott-Bryant, Ph.D., is a senior staff research scientist and head of Google Research–Kenya. She has over a decade of experience working in Africa and leading teams to develop innovative technologies that leverage AI and computing to address some of Africa’s most pressing challenges. Her current work focuses on addressing food insecurity in Africa, and exploring ways in which AI tools can transform Africa’s food system to be resilient and responsive. Prior to her time at Google, she was a senior technical staff member at IBM Research – Africa and led projects in developing AI tools for global health, water management and access, and transportation. Currently, she serves on the board for the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences doctoral research program in data science, is a workshop co-chair for the International Conference on Learning and Representations 2024 (ICLR 2024), and is on the program committee for the U.S.-Africa

Frontiers of Science, Engineering, and Medicine program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Dr. Walcott-Bryant earned her Ph.D. in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT with a focus on robotics. Her work has led to more than 30 patents and more than 30 publications.