Ramani Duraiswami is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, with appointments in the Artificial Intelligence Institute at Maryland (AIM), UMIACS, Electrical Engineering, Robotics, Neural and Cognitive Sciences, and the Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computing program. His research spans machine learning, scientific computing, and computational perception. His group develops large audio-language models (the Audio Flamingo family, including AF3, Music Flamingo, and AF-Next) and community-standard benchmarks for audio intelligence (MMAU, MMAU-Pro), and works on neural operator learning for PDE problems on complex geometries (GAIA). His earlier work on fast multipole methods for acoustic scattering, GPU computing and real-time spatial audio led to two company spin-outs; his lab’s audio technology now powers millions of VR headsets, PCs, and headphones worldwide via CEVA. He has published over 400 papers across computer science, acoustics, applied mathematics, and machine learning. Prof. Duraiswami holds a B. Tech. from IIT Bombay and a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University.
David Van Horn is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he co-leads the PLUM lab.
Jon Kleinberg is the Tisch University Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Information Science at Cornell University. His research focuses on the interaction of algorithms and networks, the roles they play in large-scale social and information systems, and their broader societal implications. He is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society, and he has served in the past on advisory groups including the US National AI Advisory Committee (NAIAC) and the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) and Committee on Science, Technology, and Law (CSTL) of the National Academies. He is the author of the textbooks “Algorithm Design” (with Eva Tardos), “Networks, Crowds, and Markets” (with David Easley), and the forthcoming “Choices and Consequences in Computing” (with Karen Levy). He has received MacArthur, Packard, Simons, Sloan, and Vannevar Bush research fellowships, as well as awards including the the Nevanlinna Prize, the World Laureates Association Prize, the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award, and the ACM Prize in Computing.
Lillian Lee is the Charles Roy Davis professor of computer science at Cornell University. Her research interests include natural language processing and computational social science. She is a AAAI Fellow, an ACL Fellow, and an ACM Fellow. She is a recipient of best paper awards at NAACL 2004 (joint with Regina Barzilay), the IJCAI 2016 “Natural Language Processing Meets Journalism” workshop (joint with Liye Fu and Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil), and ACL 2023 (one of three, with Jack Hessel, Ana Marasović, Jena Hwang, Jeff Da, Rowan Zellers, Bob Mankoff, and Yejin Choi); one of three inaugural (2018) NAACL awards for the Test of Time (2002-2012) Paper on Computational Linguistics (joint with Bo Pang) and the 25-year Test of Time award at ACL 2024; and the ACL 2021 Distinguished Service Award for her work with TACL. Her co-authored work has received several mentions in the popular press, including The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered, and NBC’s The Today Show; and one of her co-authored papers on the memorability of movie quotes was publicly called “boring” by YouTube channel Good Mythical Morning in a video viewed over 2.7 million times.
Wei-Chiu Ma is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. His research lies at the intersection of 3D/4D computer vision and robotics, with a focus on building AI systems that can understand, reconstruct, and re-simulate the dynamic world. Wei-Chiu is a recipient of the Siebel Scholarship and was selected as a rising star in Cyber Physical Systems. His work has been covered by media outlets such as WIRED, DeepLearning.AI, MIT News, etc. Previously, Wei-Chiu was a Sr. Research Scientist at UberATG and Waabi, where he served as the technical lead of the sensor simulation team. His contribution to autonomy and simulation have led to 15+ patents. He received his Ph.D. in EECS from MIT and his M.S. in Robotics from CMU.
Rupak Majumdar is a Scientific Director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. His research interests are in the verification and control of reactive, real-time, hybrid, and probabilistic systems, software verification and programming languages, logic, and automata theory. He received his Bachelors degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His research has been recognised by “Test of Time” awards from POPL, PLDI, and CONCUR.
Abhilasha Ravichander is tenure-track faculty at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. Prior to joining MPI, Abhilasha was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. She received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 2022. Her research focuses on improving the factuality, robustness, and transparency of large-scale language models. Abhilasha’s work has been presented at several top NLP conferences, receiving Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2025, Best Resource Paper Award at ACL 2024, Best Theme Paper Award at ACL 2024, and Area Chair Favorite Paper award at COLING 2018. She has been recognized as a “Rising Star in Generative AI” (2024), “Rising Star in EECS” (2022), and “Rising Star in Data Science” (2021).
