Gerald Friedland
Amazon Research, USA

​Dr. Gerald Friedland is a Principal Scientist at AWS and adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

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Dr. Friedland has published about 200 scientific publications, including two books and is a part-time Lecturer at the EECS department of the University of California. Berkeley. He is the recipient of several research and industry recognitions, among them the European Academic Software Award and the Multimedia Entrepreneur Award by the German Federal Department of Economics. He also led the team that won the ACM Multimedia Grand Challenge in 2009. Dr. Friedland received his doctorate (summa cum laude) and master’s degree in computer science from Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany, in 2002 and 2006, respectively.

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Gerald is also an avid software and hardware developer and is known for open-source contributions, such as SIOX (Simple Interactive Object Extraction), which has become the open-source standard algorithm for interactive image cut and paste used in applications like GIMP or Inkscape.

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Wardah Inam
Overjet, USA

​Wardah Inam is disrupting the dental industry. She is the cofounder and CEO of Overjet, a Boston-based startup that uses FDA-cleared artificial intelligence to assess X-rays for tooth decay and bone loss and assist in diagnostics. These insights are then passed onto insurers to help them decide whether they should approve a claim. Since it was founded in 2018, Overjet has raised nearly $80 million in funding from backers such as General Catalyst and the MIT-affiliated E14 fund. Before founding Overjet, Inam was the lead product manager at the biotechnology company Q Bio. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology in Pakistan and master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. 

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George F. Luger
University of New Mexico, USA

​​George Luger is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Luger was also a Professor in the Psychology and Linguistics Departments, reflecting his interdisciplinary interests in Cognitive Science and Computational Linguistics.

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The National Science Foundation, NATO, the British Royal Society, NASA, the Smithsonian Institution, NIH, the Departments of Defense, Energy and Transportation, NIH, and other government agencies have supported George Luger's research. He has worked with the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories and for numerous companies. Currently, his consulting is in the design of natural language web agents and deep learning technologies that analyze information in very large collections of data.

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Dr. Luger is the author of Artificial Intelligence: Structures and Strategies for Complex Problem Solving (Addison-Wesley, 2009), now in its Sixth Edition, and Knowing Our World (Springer, 2021).

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Vishal Mishra

Columbia University, USA

Vishal Misra’s research is in the broad area of networking. His work includes both developing mechanisms that make networks work better and faster, and also investigating the economic models that underpin the Internet and their impact on public policy like Network Neutrality. His approach to research is to incorporate fundamental theories like control theory, queueing theory, information theory, and game theory in the design and analysis of networks.

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Vishal has worked extensively in the design and analysis of congestion control mechanisms, both for the Internet as well as for data centers. His work, based on applying classical control theory to differential equation based model that he developed for Internet traffic, has found its way into becoming part of the DOCSIS 3.1 standard for cable modems and is being deployed worldwide. He has also played a very active role in the public policy debates related to Network Neutrality and the strong recent regulations passed by the Indian and Canadian regulatory authorities are in line with a definition of Network Neutrality he has proposed.

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He received a BTech from IIT Bombay in 1992, and an MS and PhD from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996 and 2000 respectively. Fellow of IEEE and ACM. He has been awarded a Distinguished Alumnus Award by IIT Bombay (2019) and a Distinguished Young Alumnus Award by UMass-Amherst College of Engineering (2014).

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Norbert Pohlmann

Westphalian University of Applied Sciences, Germany

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Norbert Pohlmann holds two positions at Westphalian University of Applied Sciences, Gelsenkirchen: Professor of Distributed Systems and Information Security in the field of IT, and Managing Director of the Institute for Internet Security.

Prior to holding these posts, from 1988 to 1999 he served as a managing partner of the firm KryptoKom, Society for Cryptographic Information Security and Communication Technology mbH. Following the merger of KryptoKom with Utimaco Safeware, he was a member of the management board of Utimaco Safeware AG from 1999 to 2003.

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Since April 1997, Prof. Pohlmann has been chairman of the management board of the German Association for IT Security TeleTrusT, the role of which is to establish trustworthy IT systems.
Prof. Pohlmann is co-initiator and chairman of the program committee of the "Information Security Solutions Europe" conference (ISSE), which takes place annually in different European cities (Berlin, Barcelona, London, Paris, Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Berlin, Budapest, Rome, Warsaw, Madrid, The Hague, Berlin, Prague, Brussels, Berlin).

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In addition, Prof. Pohlmann is a member of the scientific advisory board of the GDD (Society for Data Protection and Data Security e. V.), a member of the advisory board of eco (Association of the Internet Industry e. V.) and a member of the steering committee "Taskforce IT-Security" (Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology).

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For five years, he was a member of the "Permanent Stakeholders Group" of ENISA (European Network and Information Security Agency), the European Community's security agency (www.enisa.europa.eu).

Numerous articles and books, lectures, and seminars in the field of information security testify to his professional competence and his engagement in the field of IT security.

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Devavrat Shah
MIT, USA

​Devavrat Shah is a Professor with the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 2005. He is a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Sciences (LIDS) and the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). He directs the Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). He is a visiting Adjunct Professor at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) since March 2018.

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His research focuses on statistical inference and stochastic networks. His contributions span a variety of areas including resource allocation in communications networks, inference and learning on graphical models, and algorithms for social data processing including ranking, recommendations and crowdsourcing. Within the broad context of networks, his work spans a range of areas across electrical engineering, computer science and operations research.

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Shah received a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, where he received the Presidents of India Gold Medal, which is awarded to the best graduating student across all engineering disciplines. He received a PhD in computer science from Stanford University with George B. Dantzig Dissertation Award from Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

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His work has received broad recognition including Rising Star Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group for the computer systems performance evaluation community (SIGMETRICS), the Erlang Prize from the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS in addition to paper prize awards including the Best Publication Award from the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS, Best Paper Award from Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society of INFORMS, NIPS Best Paper Award and ACM SIGMETRICS Best Paper Award. He received NSF CAREER Award and he is distinguished young alumni of his alma mater IIT Bombay. He founded the machine learning start-up Celect, Inc. which helps retailer with optimizing inventory by accurate demand forecasting.