Larry P. Heck is a Professor with a joint appointment in the Schools of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds the Rhesa S. Farmer Distinguished Chair of Advanced Computing Concepts and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. His received the BSEE from Texas Tech University (1986), and MSEE and PhD EE from the Georgia Institute of Technology (1989,1991). He is a Fellow of the IEEE, inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Engineering Alumni at Georgia Tech and received the Distinguished Engineer Award from the Texas Tech University. He was a Senior Research Engineer with SRI (1992-98), VP of R&D at Nuance (1998-2005), VP of Search and Advertising Sciences at Yahoo! (2005-2009), Chief Scientist of the Microsoft Speech products and Distinguished Engineer in Microsoft Research (2009-2014), Principal Scientist with Google Research (2014-2017), CEO of Viv Labs and SVP at Samsung (2017-2021).

Mathieu Dahan is an Assistant Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. His research interests are in combinatorial optimization, game theory, and predictive analytics, with applications to service operations management and disaster logistics. His primary focus is on developing strategies for improving the resilience of large-scale infrastructures — particularly, transportation and natural gas networks — in the face of correlated failures such as security attacks and natural disasters. Current projects include: (i) Strategic design of network inspection systems; and (ii) Analytics-based response operations under uncertainty.

Dr. Dahan received a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computational Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a M.Eng. and B.Eng. from the École Centrale Paris, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Paris-Sud University. He is the recipient of the MIT Robert Thurber Fellowship, the MIT Robert Guenassia Award, the Honorable Mention for the J-WAFS Fellowships, and the Best Poster Award at the Princeton Day of Optimization.

During the summer of 2016, he worked as a research scientist intern at Amazon.com (Seattle) in the Supply Chain Optimization Technologies team. Using Machine-Learning techniques, he worked on predicting the fulfillment cost and developing a prototype to grant a fast and accurate access to future shipping cost estimates.

Eric Feron is a professor of Electrical, Computer, and Mechanical Engineering. He is the director of the Robotics, Intelligent Systems, and Control (RISC) Laboratory. He recently joined the KAUST CEMSE Division from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to his time at Georgia Tech, he was an active faculty member in MIT's Aeronautics and Astronautics department from 1993 until 2005. Feron’s career in academia began in Paris, France, where he obtained his B.S. and M.S. from École Polytechnique and École Normale Superieure, respectively. He later completed his Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at Stanford University, U.S. 

Feron's research interests center around the use of elementary concepts of control systems, optimization and computer science to address key issues in modern robotic systems. More specifically, aerobatic control of uncrewed aerial vehicles, multi-agent operations, including air traffic control systems and safety-critical software system certification. Feron is also interested in geometric control systems and control theory in general. Among his latest projects, there are a fractal drone, a few positioning systems, a wheel nature could have invented, and a self-reproducing 3D printer. 

Feron has always taught at least one course per semester since the onset of his academic career. Feron believes teaching offers a fantastic outlet to communicate display his past research and inspire his new research projects with the thoughts of his classroom students. He has taught subjects as diverse as cyber-physical systems, control systems, operations research, linear programming, software engineering, and flight mechanics. Feron is a strong proponent and author of quality online education products. He also believes in communicating knowledge through all available mechanisms, including analytical and experimental, acknowledging the multiple learning modalities preferred by students, undergraduate and graduate.