Eli Kapon, Ph.D.

Eli Kapon received his Ph.D. in physics from Tel Aviv University, Israel in 1982. He then spent two years at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, as a Chaim Weizmann Research Fellow, where he worked mainly on phase-locked arrays of semiconductor lasers. From 1984 till 1993 he was with Bellcore, New Jersey, first as member of technical staff, and from 1989 as District Manager. At Bellcore, he worked on integrated optics in III-V compounds and on low-dimensional semiconductor nanostructures, particularly quantum wires and quantum dots. He managed the Quantum Structures District and the Integrated Optoelectronics District at Bellcore from 1989 till 1992 and from 1992 till 1993, respectively. In 1993 he was appointed Professor of Physics of Nanostructures at the Physics Department of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), where he heads the Laboratory of Physics of Nanostructures. In 1999-2000 he spent his sabbatical as Sackler Scholar at the Mortimer and Raymond Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies in Tel Aviv University, Israel. During that period he helped establishing the Tel Aviv University Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and served as its first Director from 2000 to 2002. In 2001 he founded the start up BeamExpress and has been serving as its Chief Scientist. He is currently serving as Director of the Institute of Quantum Electronics and Photonics in the Faculty of Basic Sciences at EPFL. His research interests include self-organization of nanostructures, optical properties and electron transport in low-dimensional quantum structures, quantum wire and quantum dot lasers, photonic crystals and vertical cavity surface emitting lasers. He is author or co-author of >300 journal articles, >10 patents, and editor of two books on semiconductor lasers. Prof. Kapon is Fellow of the Optical Society of America, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Physical Society of America, and a recipient of a 2007 Humboldt Research Award.

Sanjay Ranka, Ph.D.

Sanjay Ranka is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Information Science and Engineering at University of Florida. From 1999-2002, as the Chief Technology Officer at Paramark (Sunnyvale, CA), he developed a real-time optimization service called PILOT for marketing campaigns. Sanjay has also held positions as a tenured faculty member at Syracuse University, academic visitor at IBM and summer researcher at Hitachi America Limited. He is a fellow of the IEEE, AAAS and AAIA (Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association) and a past member of IFIP Committee on System Modeling and Optimization. He won the 2020 Research Impact Award from IEEE Technical Committee on Cloud Computing. He is an associate editor-in-chief of the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing and an associate editor for ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Sustainable Computing: Systems and Informatics, Knowledge and Information Systems, and International Journal of Computing. Additionally, he is a book series editor for CRC Press for Bigdata. He has coauthored one book, four monographs, 300+ journal and refereed conference articles. His work has received 14,500+ citations with an h-index of 61 (based on Google Scholar). He has consulted for several startups and Fortune 500 companies.

The focus of his current research is the development of efficient computational methods and data analysis techniques to model scientific phenomenon, and practical applications of focus are improvements to the quality of healthcare and the reduction of traffic accidents. A core aspiration of his research is to develop novel algorithms and software that make an impact on the application domain, exploiting the interdependence between theory and practice of computer science.

Title of Speech: Edge Based AI for Smart Transportation

Tommaso Cremaschi, Ph.D.

Tommaso Cremaschi is an Assistant Professor (RTPC) of Mathematics in Department of Mathematics at University of Southern California. He was a Viterbi Post-Doc at MSRI at the program: Random and Arithmetic Structures in Topology. Before that he got the PhD at Boston College. He is interested in low dimensional topology. In particular he has been studying hyperbolic 3-manifolds with non-finitely generated fundamental group. He is also interested in higher Teichmüller Theory and counting problems on surfaces.

Title of Speech: Volume of Random Geodesic Complements