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Mike Nelson directs the Carnegie Endowment’s Technology and International Affairs Program, which helps decisionmakers understand and address the impacts of emerging technologies, including digital technologies, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. Prior to joining Carnegie, he started the global public policy office for Cloudflare, a startup that has improved the performance and security of more than 10 million websites around the world. Nelson has also served as a principal technology policy strategist in Microsoft’s Technology Policy Group and before that was a senior technology and telecommunications analyst with Bloomberg Government. In addition, Nelson has been teaching courses and doing research on the future of the internet, cyber-policy, technology policy, innovation policy, and e-government in the Communication, Culture, and Technology Program at Georgetown University.

Before joining the Georgetown faculty, Nelson was director of internet technology and strategy at IBM, where he managed a team helping define and implement IBM’s next generation internet strategy. He has served as chairman of the Information, Communication, and Computing Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, serves as a trustee of the Institute for International Communications, and was selected to be a “Global Leader of Tomorrow” by the World Economic Forum. From 1988 to 1993, he served as a professional staff member for the Senate’s Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space and was the lead Senate staffer for the High-Performance Computing Act. In 1993, he joined Vice President Al Gore at the White House and worked with President Bill Clinton’s science adviser on issues relating to the Global Information Infrastructure, including telecommunications policy, information technology, encryption, electronic commerce, and information policy.

View Bio Miranda Bogen is Facebook’s Policy Manager for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, where she advises AI product and research teams on matters of policy, privacy, and responsible development. Prior to joining Facebook, Miranda was a Senior Policy Analyst at Upturn, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, where she focused on governance of machine learning and artificial intelligence and the implications of emerging technology on civil and human rights. Miranda served as co-chair of the Partnership on AI’s Fair, Transparent, and Accountable AI Expert Group, and her research on algorithmic bias and fairness has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, NPR, Wired, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Reuters. Miranda holds a Masters degree from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts with a focus on technology policy and graduated summa cum laude from UCLA with degrees in Political Science and Middle Eastern & North African Studies.

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Jennifer Golbeck is a Professor in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Her research focuses on artificial intelligence and social media, privacy, and trust on the web. She focuses on combatting malicious behavior online and building algorithms that improve people's experience with information.

She received an AB in Economics and an SB and SM in Computer Science at the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park.

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Brenda Leong, CIPP/US, is Senior Counsel and Director of Artificial Intelligence and Ethics at the Future of Privacy Forum. She oversees development of privacy analysis of AI and Machine Learning technologies, manages the FPF portfolio on biometrics and digital identity, particularly Facial Recognition, along with the Ethics challenges of these emerging systems. She works on industry standards and collaboration on privacy and responsible data management, by partnering with stakeholders and advocates to reach practical solutions for consumer and commercial data uses. Prior to working at FPF, Brenda served in the U.S. Air Force, including policy and legislative affairs work from the Pentagon and the U.S. Department of State. She is a 2014 graduate of George Mason University School of Law.

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After earning his PhD in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University, George Montañez became a data scientist with Microsoft (AI+R), and is currently the Iris and Howard Critchell Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA. He holds an M.S. in computer science from Baylor University and a B.S. in computer science from the University of California Riverside. He was an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellow. He previously served as an intern at Microsoft Research and Yahoo! Labs. He has worked as a software engineer and full-stack developer. His research lies at the intersection of machine learning, algorithmic search and information theory. At the 2017 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, Montañez won the Best Poster award and the INNS/Intel Best Student Paper award for “The LICORS Cabinet: Nonparametric Light Cone Methods for Spatio-Temporal Modeling,” coauthored with Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, and a Best Student Paper award at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. He previously won the Best Paper award at CIKM 2014, with coauthors Ryen White and Xiao Huang for their paper on cross-device search. Most recently, he and his student collaborators received the Best Paper award at the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART 2020) for their paper “The Bias-Expressivity Trade-off.” He is passionate about mentoring, and has worked with over 40 undergraduate student researchers, being awarded a Diversity Mentoring Award by the Claremont Colleges Consortium in recognition of his mentoring efforts inside and outside the classroom.

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J.R. Rao is an IBM Fellow and CTO for the Security Research team at IBM. Based at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, the global team comprises more than 200 researchers who work in the areas of AI Security, Cybersecurity, Cloud and Systems Security, Information Security and Cryptography. The goal of Dr. Rao's research is to signi ficantly improve the quality of security while easing the overhead of developing and deploying secure solutions. He has published widely in premier security conferences and workshops and holds numerous US and European patents. He is a member of the IBM Academy of Technology, has served on the Industry Advisory Board of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center, and is an emeritus member of the International Federation of Information Processing Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology). Dr. Rao obtained his doctorate degree from the University of Texas at Austin, a Masters degree in computer science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and a B. Tech degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

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Dr. William Scherlis assumed the role of office director for DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O) in September 2019. In this role he leads program managers in the development of programs, technologies, and capabilities to ensure information advantage for the United States and its allies, and coordinates this work across the Department of Defense and U.S. government.

Scherlis joined DARPA from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where he is a professor of computer science. He served for 12 years as director of CMU's Institute for Software Research (ISR), overseeing research and educational programs related to software development, cybersecurity, privacy engineering, Internet of Things, network analysis, mobility, systems assurance, and other topics. During 2012 and early 2013 he was the acting chief technology officer for the Software Engineering Institute, a Department of Defense FFRDC at CMU.

Earlier in his career, Scherlis served as a program manager and later in the Senior Executive Service at DARPA, developing programs in areas such as software technology, computer security, and information infrastructure. At DARPA, he also participated in the initiation of the High Performance Computing and Communications (HPCC) program (now NITRD) and in defining the concept for CERT-like security organizations, hundreds of which now operate in more than 90 countries.

Scherlis has led multiple national studies including the National Research Council study committee that produced the report “Critical Code: Software Producibility for Defense” in 2010. He also served multiple terms as a member of DARPA’s Information Science and Technology Study Group. He has been an advisor to major technology firms, defense companies, and venture investors, and has served as program chair for a number of technical conferences including the ACM Foundations of Software Engineering Symposium and the ACM Symposium on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation. He is a fellow of the IEEE and a Lifetime National Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

Scherlis joined the CMU faculty after completing an undergraduate degree in applied mathematics at Harvard University, a year in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh as a John Knox Fellow, and a doctorate program in computer science at Stanford University. His personal research relates to software assurance, cybersecurity, software analysis, and assured safe concurrency.

Scherlis joined the Carnegie Mellon faculty after completing an A.B. magna cum laude at Harvard University in applied mathematics, a year in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) as a John Knox Fellow, and a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University (Zohar Manna advisor). His research relates to software assurance, cybersecurity, software analysis, and assured safe concurrency. His team has developed analysis tools based on techniques to verify safe concurrency, information flow, and other properties that tend to defy conventional testing and heuristic analysis. He has led several large research projects including the National Security Agency Science of Security Lablet at CMU since its inception in 2011 and, previously, the Carnegie Mellon / NASA High Dependability Computing Project (HDCP).

Scherlis has testified before Congress on federal software sustainment, on computing technology and innovation, and on roles for a Federal CIO. He interrupted his career at CMU to serve at Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for more than six years, departing in 1993 as a federal senior executive. At DARPA his responsibilities related to research and strategy in software technology, computer security, information infrastructure, and other topics. He participated in the initiation of the high performance computing and communications (HPCC) program (now NITRD) and in defining the concept for CERT-like security organizations, hundreds of which now operate in more than 90 countries world-wide.

Scherlis has led multiple national studies including the National Research Council (NRC) study committee that produced the report Critical Code: Software Producibility for Defense in 2010. He served multiple terms as a member of the DARPA Information Science and Technology Study Group (ISAT). He has been an advisor to major technology firms, defense companies, and venture investors, and is a co-founder of Panopto, a CMU spin-off. He has served as program chair for a number of technical conferences including the ACM Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE) Symposium and the ACM Symposium on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation (PEPM).

He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Lifetime National Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.