Artificial Intelligence Symposium

Jyotika Athavale
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Computer Society president elect and lead technologist – functional safety at NVIDIA

With over 25 years of industry experience, Athavale is currently a senior technical leader in automotive functional safety at NVIDIA, and is driving capability development, safety architectures and methodologies, system safety engineering activities and pathfinding for safety critical markets such as autonomous driving and avionics. Prior to NVIDIA, she was principal engineer (director) at Intel Corporation where she led functional safety platform architectures for automotive and avionics use cases and drove methodologies for radiation effects modeling and product qualification activities.

Mohan S. Gundeti
Professor and chief of pediatric urology at the University of Chicago: Comer Children’s Hospital

Gundeti is an acclaimed innovator and pioneer in the field of pediatric robotic surgery. He is credited with some of the first procedures performed in the world. In addition to being a compassionate surgeon, he frequently shares his knowledge through worldwide surgical workshops and lectures, which have benefited thousands of patients and surgeons across the world. He is a dedicated educator and continues to teach at the University of Chicago and worldwide. He has authored and edited several manuscripts and textbooks of pediatric and robotic urological surgery to reach a global audience.

His work has received accolades from the American and European Society of Urology, including the prestigious Hans-Marberger award and the Best Doctor in Chicago award for numerous years. Alongside his brothers, he co-founded the Gundeti Foundation to provide health care to underserved populations in India. 

Amy Roberts, Ph.D.
Assistant professor in the physics department at University of Colorado Denver 

At the University of Colorado Denver, Roberts listens for “dark matter” with ultra-cold detectors. Although gravitational measurements suggest this “dark matter” makes up fully 80% of the universe’s mass, it has never been directly detected. Roberts is a member of the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search collaboration (SuperCDMS), which specializes in sensing the faintest possible signals from highly sensitive phonon detectors. Her work focuses on understanding detector response at low energies, novel signal analysis, and building software tools that make data and analysis accessible to all scientists.

Dongming Mei, Ph.D.
Professor in the Department of Physics and director of CUBED

Mei joined USD in 2006 after obtaining a Ph.D. from the University of Alabama in 2003 and completing a three-year postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory. His research focuses on underground nuclear and particle physics in search for rare physics processes beyond the Standard Model of physics.

William C.W. Chen, M.D., Ph.D.
Assistant professor in the Division of Basic Biomedical Sciences at the USD Sanford School of Medicine

Prior to joining USD in 2021, Chen was a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Using synthetic, systems and computational biology principles and toolkits, the Chen group at USD focuses on developing and translating next-generation diagnostic and therapeutic technologies for cardiovascular disease and regenerative medicine. Chen's research is currently supported by the American Heart Association and the Department of Defense.

KC Santosh, Ph.D.
Chair of the Department of Computer Science

Prior to his time at USD, he worked as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health. With over $1 million in funding, more than 220 peer-reviewed research articles and nine authored books, Santosh has demonstrated his expertise in artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, data mining and big data. He serves multiple prestigious journals as an academic editor and an associate editor. Santosh is highly motivated and interested in academic leadership. Learn more about Santosh at https://kc-santosh.org.