2016 Speakers


Professor Ali Abedi (speaker abstract) received his Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering, from University of Waterloo in 2004. He joined the University of Maine, Orono in 2005, where he is currently Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of Center for Undergraduate Research (CUGR) at the office of the VP Research.

He was a faculty fellow at NASA MSFC during summer of 2016, visiting Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD and Guest Researcher at NIST in 2012 and adjunct Professor at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada in 2004. Dr. Abedi served as Principal Investigator on several NASA, Army, and NSF funded projects including Wireless Sensing of Lunar Habitat and Leak Detection for International Space Station, which are featured on Phys.org and NSF Science360.

Dr. Abedi has received a number of awards and recognitions from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Canadian Space Agency (CSA), NASA, and IEEE. He has published over 80 papers in IEEE journals and conferences including several books. Dr. Abedi is a senior member of IEEE and has served on several IEEE Committees at local, regional, national, and international levels as well as organizing committee of several IEEE Int'l conferences and editorial boards of IEEE, KICS, and IET journals. He is co-founder of two startup companies and co-inventor of Wireless Sensors for Brain Injury Detection with Prof. Hayes.




George C. Giakos (speaker abstract) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Manhattan College, NY. In addition, he is the Director of the Graduate Program. Prior joining Manhattan College, he has been a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Biomedical Engineering, for the last 20 years, at the University of Akron, OH, USA. While at the University of Akron, he directed the design and development of the US AFRL Multifunctional Imaging Surveillance platform, designed under an AFRL research contract. Dr. Giakos has been recognized for "his leadership efforts in advancing the professional goals of IEEE" by receiving the 2014 IEEE-USA Professional Achievement Award, "in recognition of his efforts in strengthening links between industry, government and academia". He has been elected an IEEE Fellow based on his "Contributions to Efficient Imaging Devices, Systems and Techniques". He is a Distinguished Faculty fellow for the Office of Naval Research.

In addition, he served for several years as faculty Fellow at NASA and Air Force Research Laboratories (AFRL). Professor Giakos received his Laurea in Physics from the University of Turin (Italy), a Post Graduate Diploma in Nuclear Instrumentation from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland), an MS Degree in Physics from Ohio University. He received his Ph.D in Electrical and Computer Engineering, from Marquette University, following Post- Doctoral Training in Medical Imaging, in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Tennessee.

His research group was the first in the US to pioneer the characterization of the detection and imaging characteristics of Cadmium Zinc Telluride semiconductor substrates for flat-panel digital radiography applications.






Matteo Riondato (speaker abstract) is a Research Scientist at Two Sigma Investments in New York City, and a Visiting Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Brown University. His research focuses on algorithmic data science: he develops theoretical and applied methods to extract the most information from large datasets, as fast as possible and in a statistically sound way. The problems he studies include pattern extraction, graph mining, and time series analysis. His results have been published in the main venues in data and web mining, databases, and machine learning. Among the awards he received are the Best Student Paper Award at ACM KDD and the Best Student Poster award at SIAM SDM. He tweets at @teorionda and writes at http://matteo.rionda.to.








Katrina LaCurts (speaker abstract) is a lecturer in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at MIT. She received her PhD in computer science from MIT in 2014. Her PhD research revolved around network measurement and using measurement data to make client applications for cloud-computing infrastructures and datacenters network-aware in order to improve performance. As a lecturer, Dr. LaCurts is responsible for teaching courses that span many topics in computer systems: information theory, signal processing, operating systems, networking, security, etc. Despite this breadth, she is able to talk about her favorite thing ‐ the Voyager program ‐ at least once in every course that she teaches.