Wei Xu is an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Xu received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University, and her B.S. and M.S. from Tsinghua University. Her research interests are in natural language processing, machine learning, and social media. Her recent work focuses on text generation, stylistics, information extraction, robustness and controllability of machine learning models, and reading and writing assistive technology. She is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, CrowdFlower AI for Everyone Award, Criteo Faculty Research Award, and Best Paper Award at COLING'18. She has also received funds from DARPA and IARPA and is part of the Machine Learning Center and NSF AI CARING Institute at Georgia Tech.

Thomas Ploetz is a computer scientist with expertise and almost 15 years of experience in Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning research (Ph.D. from Bielefeld University, Germany). His research agenda focuses on applied machine learning that is developing systems and innovative sensor data analysis methods for real world applications. Primary application domain for his work is computational behavior analysis, in which he develops methods for automated and objective behavior assessments in naturalistic environments. Main driving functions for his work are "in the wild" deployments and the development of systems and methods that have a real impact on people’s lives.

In 2017, Dr. Ploetz joined the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he works as an associate professor. Prior to this, he was an academic at the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University in Newcastle in Tyne, U.K., where he was a reader (associate professor) for Computational Behavior Analysis affiliated with Open Lab, Newcastle's interdisciplinary center for research in digital technologies.

Visit the Computational Behavior Analysis Lab: cba.gatech.edu.

Betsy DiSalvo is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing. DiSalvo’s work is focused on computer science (CS) education and informal learning. She is PI for several NSF-funded CS education projects, including exploring maker-oriented learning approaches to increase transfer and reflection in CS courses and the DataWorks project, an authentic working environment for minority young adults that provides CS education through entry-level jobs.

DiSalvo collaborates with game developers and others to develop educational games such as the Beats Empire game, which assesses CS learning outcomes and the Hemonauts game, which helps chronically ill children learn science concepts related to their bodies. In the past decade, DiSalvo has led research efforts to understand the use of information technology by minority parents in their children’s education, working with African American and Latin American parents in Atlanta. DiSalvo's work has included the development of the Glitch Game Testers program, a CS education effort with African American males, and projects for the Carnegie Science Museum, the Children's Museum of Atlanta, Eyedrum Art Center, and the Walker Art Center.

Dr. Braunstein developed Georgia Tech’s first health informatics courses — a graduate seminar offered on campus, an OMSCS elective and an undergraduate VIP project course. In all three courses, students work under the mentorship of domain experts to develop Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) based apps for providers, patients, public health and other FHIR use cases. He also developed the first two public health informatics Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and a three-course health informatics professional certificate on edX. 

In 2018 and 2019, he developed a similar course at the University of Queensland (UQ) as a Visiting Scientist at the Australian E-Health Research Centre (AEHRC), the health informatics laboratory within CSIRO, the Australian national research organization. He returned to Australia as a Visiting Scientist in 2022 and has also been working with AEHRC and UQ on an innovative, informatics-based approach to Case Based Learning in medical education. 

He is a frequent speaker at academic and industry meetings. The second edition of his textbook, Health Informatics on FHIR: How HL7’s API is Transforming Healthcare, was published by Springer in 2022 and is the first book devoted to the current and future impact of FHIR on healthcare in the US and worldwide.

Michael L. Best is Executive Director of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) and Professor with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology where he directs the Technologies and International Development Lab. He holds a Ph.D. from MIT and has served as director of Media Lab Asia in India and head of the eDevelopment group at the MIT Media Lab.
 

Research Fields:
* Information and Communications Technologies for Development
* International Diffusion and Innovation in IT

Geographic Focuses:
* Africa (Sub-Saharan)
* Asia (East)
* Asia (South)
* Latin America and Caribbean

Issues:
* Inequality and Social Justice
* International Development
* Digital and Mixed Media
* Digital Communication
* Human/Machine Interaction
* Internet Studies

Thad Starner is a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Interactive Computing. Thad was perhaps the first to integrate a wearable computer into his everyday life as an intelligent personal assistant. Starner's work as a Ph.D. student would help found the field of Wearable Computing. His group's prototypes and patents on mobile MP3 players, mobile instant messaging and e-mail, gesture-based interfaces, and mobile context-based search foreshadowed now commonplace devices and services. Thad has authored over 100 scientific publications with over 100 co-authors on mobile Human Computer Interaction (HCI), pattern discovery, human power generation for mobile devices, and gesture recognition, and he is a founder and current co-chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Wearable Information Systems. His work is discussed in public forums such as CNN, NPR, the BBC, CBS's 60 Minutes, The New York Times, Nikkei Science, The London Independent, The Bangkok Post, and The Wall Street Journal.