Hector Garcia-Molina is the Leonard Bosack and Sandra Lerner Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, California. He was the chairman of the Computer Science Department from January 2001 to December 2004. From 1997 to 2001 he was a member the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). From August 1994 to December 1997 he was the Director of the Computer Systems Laboratory at Stanford. From 1979 to 1991 he was on the faculty of the Computer Science Department at Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey. His research interests include distributed computing systems, digital libraries and database systems. He received a BS in electrical engineering from the Instituto Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, in 1974. From Stanford University, Stanford, California, he received in 1975 a MS in electrical engineering and a PhD in computer science in 1979. He holds an honorary PhD from ETH Zurich (2007).

Garcia-Molina is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; received the 1999 ACM SIGMOD Innovations Award; is on the Technical Advisory Board of DoCoMo Labs USA, Yahoo Search & Marketplace; is a Venture Advisor for Diamondhead Ventures, and is a member of the Board of Directors of Oracle and Kintera.

Ann Quiroz Gates is the Associate Vice President for Research and Sponsored Projects at the University of Texas at El Paso and past chair of the Computer Science Department. Her research areas are requirements elicitation, formal specifications, and workflow-driven ontologies. Gates directs the NSF-funded Cyber-ShARE Center that focuses on developing and sharing resources through cyber-infrastructure to advance research and education in science. She was a founding member of the NSF Advisory Committee for Cyberinfrastructure, and she serves on the Board of Governors of IEEE-Computer Society. She is the vice chair for the IEEE Technical Field Awards Committee. Gates leads the Computing Alliance for Hispanic-Serving Institutions (CAHSI), an NSF-funded consortium that is focused on the recruitment, retention, and advancement of Hispanics in computing, and is a founding member of the Academic Alliance for the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

She has served on the National Academy of Engineering’s Committee on Engineering Education (2002-2004) and on the steering committee for the Frontiers in Education Conference (2000-2006). In 2003, she received the University of Texas’s Chancellor’s Council Award for Outstanding Teaching, and she was named to Hispanic Business magazine's 100 Influential Hispanics in 2006 for her work on the Affinity Research Group model that focuses on development of undergraduate students involved in research.

Dr. Charles Lee Isbell, Jr. received his bachelor of science degree in computer science in 1990 from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was named its outstanding student by the President. Awarded a fellowship from AT&T Bell Labs as well as an NSF fellowship, he continued his education at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After earning his PhD from MIT in 1998, Charles joined AT&T Labs/Research. In the Fall of 2002, he returned to Georgia Tech to join the faculty of the College of Computing.

Charles' research interests are varied. He has worked on a number of projects, including scaling machine learning algorithms like independent components analysis to problem spaces existing in hundreds of thousands of dimensions, developing extensions to description logics, developing new reinforcement learning techniques for balancing multiple sources of reward in social environments, state and activity discovery, light-weight coordination between multiple agents, partial programming, and building adaptive email architectures for users who need to manage hundreds of email messages a day.

The unifying theme of his work in recent years has been using statistical machine learning to enable autonomous agents to engage in life-long learning when in the presence of thousands of other intelligent agents, including humans. His recent technical focus is on developing new algorithms for activity discovery; doing adaptive coordination, especially in narrative; and in developing adaptive programming languages. His work with agents who interact in social communities has been featured in The New York Times, the Washington Post and Time magazine's inaugural edition of Time Digital magazine, as well as in several technical collections. Since graduating from MIT, he has won two best paper awards for technical contributions in this area. He was also awarded the Outstanding Junior Faculty Award in the College for some of this work.

Since returning to Georgia Tech, Charles has also pursued reform in computer science education. He has been awarded the William A. “gus” Baird Faculty Teacher Award as well as numerous other teaching awards, and has been granted the Dean’s Award for singular contribution to the College. The latter was for his work on Threads, Georgia Tech’s new structuring principle for computing curricula. This work has received international attention, and been presented in the academic and popular press. Recently, he has become the Interim Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Undergraduate Education for the College of Computing.

Charles’ research group is The Laboratory for Interactive Artificial Intelligence. For more information, please see: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~isbell/.

Jane Margolis is a social scientist at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies who studies educational inequities. She received the 2005 Computing Research Association Habermann award for her work on diversity in computing.

She is the co-author of two books that focus on computer science – Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing (MIT Press, 2002) and Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing (MIT Press, 2008). Stuck in the Shallow End was the winner of the 2009 Prose Award in Education from the Association of American Publishers. The book, which includes a powerful Forward by Shirley Malcom and Afterword by Richard Tapia, is based on research done in three Los Angeles high schools, addressing why so few African-American and Latino students are learning computer science. Through the lens of computer science education, Margolis’ work reveals not only the dynamics of the gender and race gap in computer science, but also the ways that inequality is produced in our society. Her work further addresses strategies and possibilities for institutional change.

Mario Pipkin is General Manager of the Enterprise Experience Division (ExD) within the Microsoft Information Technology (MSIT) Engineering organization. ExD is responsible for maintaining some of Microsoft’s most critical business applications. The groups which comprise ExD span multiple continents and countries and are accountable for the SAP instance, Micosoft Business Solutions IT, Integration Center of Excellence, Dynamics AX Center of Excellence, Microsoft’s Licensing and Original Equipment Manufactures business.

During Mario’s time at Microsoft, he has built several MS technology showcases. Since joining Microsoft in January 1995 Mario has served in almost every role in IT, ranging from Project Management to Production Support and now General Manager. Prior to joining Microsoft, Mario successfully ran his own IT consulting company, before that he worked for Boeing as a systems analyst, and for the Federal Government developing artificial intelligence systems. He graduated from the ITT Peterson School of Business in Seattle.

In Mario’s spare time he enjoys spending time with his wife and their five children, as well as driving and showcasing his many classic cars.