John Brooks Slaughter Leadership in Engineering DEI Summit
Speakers







Published on September 22nd, 2023
Last updated on November 28th, 2023
Published on September 22nd, 2023
Last updated on November 28th, 2023
Dr Charles Barber was appointed to the Senior Executive Service and assumed the duties as CDIO at NSF in January 2023. In this role, he serves as NSF’s senior advisor responsible for providing vision, strategic leadership and management for ongoing agency programs and new initiatives related to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, or DEIA, workplace and the STEM enterprise.
Prior to his appointment at NSF, Dr. Barber served as director of diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower and Reserve Affairs and was a primary author on the Task Force One Navy report that led to the Operational Navy’s DE&I Implementation Strategy. He is a TEDx speaker and served as the feature speaker on DEI at the 2022 DAU TEDx conference.
Dr. Barber has led a broad range of diversity efforts, development of culture intelligence capabilities, strategy, organizational leadership, critical data analysis and business transformation initiatives that have provided world class human resource and transformational leadership support to a dynamic range of public and private sector clients to include military service members, civilians and their families. With more than two decades of experience in human resources, diversity and inclusion, business transformation and cultural intelligence, he is a staunch advocate for efficiency, transformation and process improvement.
Dr. Hal Daumé holds notable positions in academia and research. He serves as the Volpi-Cupal Professor in the Computer Science department and is associated with the Language Science department at UMD, where he plays a leading role in TRAILS, the Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society.
Hal also assumes the role of Senior Principal Researcher within the machine learning and fairness groups at Microsoft Research NYC. His research endeavors, along with his exceptional group of advisees, revolve around exploring the intricacies of enhancing machine proficiency in human language and various artificial intelligence tasks. This involves the creation of innovative models and algorithms designed to facilitate machine learning from data.
Dr. Daumé has engaged in discussions about interactive learning through various channels. He provided insights on this topic in an informal manner during a Talking Machines Podcast, and he has delved into the subject more technically through recent presentations. Additionally, Hal has explored the realms of fairness and bias, addressing these concepts broadly in a blog post, albeit one that has become somewhat outdated over time.
He is a valued member of the Computational Linguistics and Information Processing Lab, of which he was previously the director. Further, his affiliations extend to the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and the Center for Machine Learning, where he collaborates with exceptional colleagues in his pursuit of advancing knowledge and research.
Dr. Yolanda Gill is a Senior Director for Strategic Artificial Intelligence and Data Science Initiatives at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, and Research Professor in Computer Science and in Spatial Sciences. She is also Director of Data Science programs and of the USC Center for Knowledge Powered Interdisciplinary Data Science. She received her M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, with a focus on artificial intelligence. She initiated and chaired the W3C Provenance Group that led to a community standard in this area. Dr. Gil has served in the Advisory Committee of the Computer Science and Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She is also Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and served as its 24th President.
Her research is on intelligent interfaces for knowledge capture and discovery, which she investigates in a variety of projects concerning scientific discovery, knowledge-based planning and problem solving, information analysis and assessment of trust, semantic annotation and metadata, and community-wide development of knowledge bases. Dr. Gil collaborates with scientists in different domains on semantic workflows and metadata capture, social knowledge collection, computer-mediated collaboration, and automated discovery.
Dr. Alicia J. Knoedler is the Head of the Office of Integrative Activities (OIA) at the National Science Foundation (NSF). She joined the NSF in 2021 after serving as the Vice President for Research and Innovation at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Dr. Knoedler's career has focused on cultivating and expanding research and innovation through an emphasis on collaborative, interdisciplinary work aligned with institutional strengths and interests as well as the development and cultivation of strong and diverse research infrastructure and competitive capacity.
In leadership and service to the national research enterprise, Dr. Knoedler has held leadership positions within the National Organization of Research Development Professionals (NORDP), served as Vice-Chair of NSF's Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering (CEOSE), was a member of NSF's Business and Operations Advisory Committee, and developed professional development programs for senior research leaders within APLU's Council on Research. She served as Co-PI of Oklahoma's EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Track 1 award from NSF from 2013-2018.
Premkumar Natarajan is a professor of computer science. He leads teams, and advises Ph.D. students, in his areas of expertise: novel approaches to face, handwriting, character, handwriting and speech recognition, along with other deep learning and natural language processing directions.
Natarajan joined ISI from Raytheon BBN Technologies, where he served as an executive vice president and principal scientist. As head of BBN’s speech, language, and multimedia business, he founded highly successful computer vision, speech-to-speech translation, and document image processing groups. Natarajan also launched foundational research efforts in computational social science and predictive analytics, along with initiatives that commercialized BBN research into marketable products.
His other leadership roles include serving as organizing chair, co-chair and committee member for major conferences of the International Association for Pattern Recognition and International Speech Communication Association. His latest involvement, Interspeech 2016, occurs in September this year.