Prof. Geoffrey Charles Fox (Indiana University, USA)

Distinguished Professor

Fox received a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge University and is now distinguished professor of Informatics and Computing, and Physics at Indiana University where he is director of the Digital Science Center, Chair of Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering and Director of the Data Science program at the School of Informatics and Computing.

He previously held positions at Caltech, Syracuse University and Florida State University after being a postdoc at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and Peterhouse College Cambridge.

He has supervised the Ph.D. of 72 students and published around 1250 papers in physics and computer science with an index of 70 and over 36000 citations.

He currently works in applying computer science from infrastructure to analytics in Biology, Pathology, Sensor Clouds, Earthquake and Ice-sheet Science, Image processing, Deep Learning, Manufacturing, Network Science and Particle Physics. The infrastructure work is built around Software Defined Systems on Clouds and Clusters. The analytics focuses on scalable parallelism.

He is involved in several projects to enhance the capabilities of Minority Serving Institutions. He has experience in online education and its use in MOOCs for areas like Data and Computational Science.

He is a Fellow of APS (Physics) and ACM (Computing).

Prof. Omer Rana (Cardiff University, United Kingdom)

Prof. Omer F. Rana is Professor of Performance Engineering at Cardiff University, with research interests in high performance distributed computing, data analysis/mining and multi-agent systems. He leads the Complex Systems Research Group. He was formerly the deputy director of the Welsh eScience Centre and had the opportunity to interact with a number of computational scientists across Cardiff University and the UK. He serves on the steering committee of Cardiff University's multi-disciplinary “Data Innovation” and “Energy Systems” Research Institutes. Rana has contributed to specification and standardisation activities via the Open Grid Forum and worked as a software developer with London-based Marshall Bio-Technology Limited prior to joining Cardiff University, where he developed specialist software to support biotech instrumentation. He also contributed to public understanding of science, via the Wellcome Trust funded “Science Line”, in collaboration with BBC and Channel 4. Rana holds a PhD in “Neural Computing and Parallel Architectures” from Imperial College (London Univ.), an MSc in Microelectronics (Univ. of Southampton) and a BEng in Information Systems Eng. from Imperial College (London Univ.). He serves on the editorial boards (as Associate Editor) of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, (formerly) IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, IEEE Cloud Computing magazine and ACM Transactions on Internet Technology. He is a founding-member and associate editor of ACM Transactions on Autonomous & Adaptive Systems.

Prof. Mehmet M. Dalkılıç (Indiana University, USA)

Dr. Mehmet M. Dalkilic was born and raised in Texas. He received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry, and after a brief stint in IU's MD/PhD program (Biochemistry), graduated with a degree in Computer Science. He was the first faculty in the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering and is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department and adjunct in the Statistics Department. He was the co-creator of the computational biology program at IU as well as the creator of the introductory course for Informatics that has approximately 1,400 majors. He is currently the new Director of the Undergraduate Data Science Program and has created a dual introductory Computer Science Class that focuses on teaching programming through analytics in both STEM and non-STEM fields. He has graduated five PhD students and works in Data Science, Big Data, AI/ML, marine ecology, astronomy, material sciences, pedagogy, and does work with Navy.