Short Bios of Speakers

Shawn Newsam is an associate professor and founding faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Merced. He was the first EECS faculty hired at the newest UC campus, arriving only a month before it opened to students in August 2005. Prior to UC Merced, he was a post-doctoral researcher with the Sapphire Scientific Data Mining group in the Center for Applied Scientific Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara, his M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California at Davis, and his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.
Dr. Newsam is the recipient of a U.S. National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Scientist and Engineer Award, and a U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He is the vice chair of SIGSPATIAL, the ACM special interest group which address issues related to the acquisition, management, and processing of spatially-related information, and is the general co-chair of the group's flagship conference in 2017. His research interests include image processing, computer vision, and pattern recognition with a focus on the synergy between images and geographic location. His NSF CAREER award is titled Social Multimedia as Volunteered Geographic Information: Crowdsourcing What-Is-Where on the Surface of the Earth Through Proximate Sensing.

Ruzica Piskac is an assistant professor (tenure-track) at Yale University's Computer Science Department. Her research interests span the areas of programming languages, software verification, automated reasoning, and code synthesis. A common thread in Ruzica's research is improving software reliability and trustworthiness using formal techniques. Ruzica has received an NSF CAREER award for her proposal, "Synthesis in a Live Programming Environment". The goal of this project is to build theoretical foundations of the programming by example paradigm, and incorporate it into a modern IDE. Our motivation is to increase programmer productivity while simultaneously lowering the barriers to entry for novice programmers.

Walid Saad received his Ph.D degree from the University of Oslo in 2010. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor and the Steven O. Lane Junior Faculty Fellow at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, where he leads the Network Science, Wireless, and Security (NetSciWiS) laboratory, within the Wireless@VT research group. His research interests include wireless networks, game theory, cybersecurity, unmanned aerial vehicles, and cyber-physical systems. Dr. Saad is the recipient of the NSF CAREER award in 2013 for his project "Towards Context-Aware, Self-Organizing Wireless Small Cell Networks", the AFOSR summer faculty fellowship in 2014, and the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) in 2015. He was the author/co-author of five conference best paper awards at WiOpt in 2009, ICIMP in 2010, IEEE WCNC in 2012, IEEE PIMRC in 2015, and IEEE SmartGridComm in 2015. He is the recipient of the 2015 Fred W. Ellersick Prize from the IEEE Communications Society. Dr. Saad serves as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Communications, and IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.

Linwei Wang is an Associate Professor in the PhD Program of Computing and Information Sciences at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. Her research interests center around data-driven modeling, statistical inference, and uncertainty quantification, with an application to personalized biomedicine to improve patient care in cardiac arrhythmia and other heart diseases. Her research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Wang obtained her bachelor degree in Optic-Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University (China) in 2005, her master degree in Electronic and Computer Engineering from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2007, and her PhD in Computing and Information Sciences from RIT prior to joining the faculty of RIT in 2009. NSF CAREER project: Integrating Physical Models into Data-Driven Inference.