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Yi Cao

Assistant Professor of Accounting, Costello College of Business

Yi Cao is an Assistant Professor of Accounting in the Costello College of Business at Â鶹ÊÓƵ. Yi has a broad range of research interests that relate to corporate voluntary disclosure channels, the interaction of labor economics and financial reporting quality, and capital market study using novel tools such as LLM and other machine learning and textual analysis techniques. Cao's research interests include corporate voluntary disclosure, product market competition, financial disclosure quality, and textual analysis, and has been published in Contemporary Accounting Research.

Presenting: George Â鶹ÊÓƵ AI Research Showcase

Long Chen

Accounting Area Chair and Associate Professor of Accounting, Costello College of Business

Long Chen is Accounting Area Chair and Associate Professor of Accounting in the Costello College of Business at Â鶹ÊÓƵ. She conducts empirical archival research on topics related to financial reporting and disclosure, corporate social responsibility, executive profiles, artificial intelligence, and international accounting.

Presenting: George Â鶹ÊÓƵ AI Research Showcase

Tina Eliassi-Rad

Joseph E. Aoun Professor, Northeastern University

Tina Eliassi-Rad is the inaugural Joseph E. Aoun Professor at Northeastern University. She is also an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute and the Vermont Complex Systems Institute. Prior to joining Northeastern, Eliassi-Reed was an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Rutgers University; and before that a member of the technical staff at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She earned her PhD in computer sciences (with a minor in mathematical statistics) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Eliassi-Reed works at the intersection of AI and network science and is interested in the impact of science and technology on society. Her algorithms have been integrated into systems used by governments, industry, and open-source software. Eliassi-Reed received an Outstanding Mentor Award from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science in 2010, became an ISI Foundation Fellow in 2019, was named one of the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics in 2021, received Northeastern University's Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award in 2022, was awarded the Lagrange Prize in 2023, and was elected Fellow of the Network Science Society in 2023.

Presenting: Opening Keynote

Karina Korostelina

Professor and Director, Sustainable Peace Lab and Program on History, Memory, and Conflict, Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution

Karina V. Korostelina is a Professor and Director of Sustainable Peace Lab and of the Program on History, Memory, and Conflict in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution at Â鶹ÊÓƵ. She is a President of the International Association for Reconciliation Studies. Korostelina is a social psychologist whose work focuses on dynamics of social identity and power in protracted social conflicts. Within this theoretical framework, she conducts research in several areas: (1) identity-based conflicts, including ethnic conflicts and nation building processes, nationalism and mass violence; (2) peace processes, reconciliation, and peacebuilding in post-conflict societies; (3) environmental peacebuilding; (4) the role of history in conflict and post-conflict societies; and (4) resilience in communities affected by chronic conflict and violence.

Presenting: George Â鶹ÊÓƵ AI Research Showcase

David Lattanzi, PhD, PE, FSEI

Professor, Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering, College of Engineering and Computing

David Lattanzi, Professor of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering in the College of Engineering and Computing at Â鶹ÊÓƵ, is a licensed bridge engineer who puts his professional experience to work in the development of the next generation of infrastructure inspection technologies. Responding to the crisis of our nation's aging infrastructure, Lattanzi's group focuses on a multidisciplinary combination of data analytics, robotics, artificial intelligence, and structural engineering to help civil engineers make safer and more reliable life-cycle assessments. Some of his current initiatives include the use of digital image analysis for rapid post-disaster assessments and how to combine autonomous robotic inspection with ultra-high resolution 3D imaging to create virtual worlds for inspectors.

Presenting: AI Research Showcase

Yikuan Li

Assistant Professor, Department of Health Administration and Policy, College of Public Health

Yikuan Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Administration and Policy of the College of Public Health at Â鶹ÊÓƵ. He earned his PhD in health and biomedical informatics from the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, where his thesis research on heart failure prediction was supported by the American Heart Association Predoctoral Fellowship. His research interests include leveraging multimodal machine learning to build clinical predictive models, applying large language models to advance health interoperability, and using reinforcement learning to optimize health policy and decision-making.

Presenting: George Â鶹ÊÓƵ AI Research Showcase

Elizabeth Phillips

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Elizabeth "Beth" Phillips is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology in the Human Factors and Applied Cognition Group of the College of Humanities and Social Science at Â鶹ÊÓƵ. Phillips is the director of the Applied Psychology and Autonomous Systems (ALPHAS) Lab and the co-director of the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Lab. Her expertise is in human interactions with robots, autonomous systems, and related technologies like augmented and virtual reality. She studies how we can design these systems to be better partners and teammates for people in the near future.

Presenting: George Â鶹ÊÓƵ AI Research Showcase

Katherine Scafide, PhD, RN, FAAN

Associate Professor, School of Nursing, College of Public Health

Katherine Scafide, PhD, RN, FAAN, FAAFS, is a tenured Associate Professor in the School of Nursing within the College of Public Health at Â鶹ÊÓƵ. She is an internationally recognized nurse scientist whose work integrates forensic science, health equity, digital health, and artificial intelligence to improve the detection and documentation of injuries, particularly among populations historically underserved by clinical and forensic systems. Scafide is a Principal Investigator and co-Director of the Injury Analytics Lab, an interdisciplinary research environment spanning nursing, engineering, computer science, biostatistics, forensic science, and public health.

Presenting: AI Research Showcase

Amarda Shehu

Vice President and Chief AI Officer, Â鶹ÊÓƵ

Amarda Shehu is the inaugural Vice President and Chief AI Officer at Â鶹ÊÓƵ, where she leads institution-wide AI strategy spanning research, education, workforce development, and external partnerships. She is the architect of George Â鶹ÊÓƵ's AI education and literacy pipeline, including the university's MS in AI and the general-education "AI for All" course, and she chairs the university's AI-in-Government Council, convening academia, industry, and public agencies to advance responsible, mission-driven AI. Her national service includes work as an NSF Program Director in the CISE Directorate (2019-2022), where she helped shape AI, data science, biotechnology, and innovation agendas across academia, government, and industry.

Janusz Wojtusiak, PhD

Professor of Health Informatics and Director, Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory, College of Public Health

Janusz Wojtusiak, Professor of Health Informatics and Director of the Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory in the College of Public Health at Â鶹ÊÓƵ, has expertise that spans machine learning, health informatics, artificial intelligence in clinical decision support and knowledge discovery in medical data, and a wide range of applications of these fields in health care. His particular area of interest is in developing algorithms that derive simple, transparent and usable models from complex health data to predict patient and population outcomes. He studies how to create and evaluate reproducible, unbiased, and trustworthy algorithms and models.

Presenting: AI Research Showcase

Xuesu Xiao

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering and Computing

Xuesu Xiao is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science of the College of Engineering and Computing at Â鶹ÊÓƵ. Xiao (Prof. XX) directs the RobotiXX lab, in which researchers (XX-Men and XX-Women) and robots (XX-Bots) work together at the intersection of motion planning and machine learning with a specific focus on developing highly capable and intelligent mobile robots that are robustly deployable in the real world with minimal human supervision. Xiao's work has been deployed in real-world robot field missions, including search and rescue effort in the Mexico City earthquake and the Greece refugee crisis, decommissioning effort in the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and multiple search and rescue exercises in the US.

Presenting: George Â鶹ÊÓƵ AI Research Showcase

Chaowei (Phil) Yang

Professor of Geographic Information Science, College of Science

Chaowei Phil Yang is a Professor of Geographic Information Science (GIS) in the College of Science at Â鶹ÊÓƵ. His research focuses on utilizing spatiotemporal principles to optimize computing infrastructure to support science discoveries and engineering development. He is the founder and directs the George Â鶹ÊÓƵ CISC and the NSF Spatiotemporal Innovation Center to build the spatiotemporal infrastructure for advancing human intelligence through spatiotemporal thinking, computer software and tools through spatiotemporal computing, and the human capability of responding to deep scientific questions and grand engineering challenges through spatiotemporal applications. A pioneer in GIS research, Yang has advanced the discipline from a computing perspective, introducing key concepts such as geospatial cyberinfrastructure, spatial cloud computing, spatiotemporal computing, and most recently, geospatial digital twins.

Presenting: George Â鶹ÊÓƵ AI Research Showcase

Pat Yongpradit

General Manager of Global Education and Workforce Policy, Microsoft

Pat Yongpradit is Microsoft General Manager of Global Education and Workforce Policy and has over a decade of experience across computer science education, workforce development, and national policy as previous Chief Academic Officer of Code.org.

Presenting: AI Literacy at George Â鶹ÊÓƵ