Dr. İlkay Altıntaş is the Chief Data Science Officer and the Founding Director of the Workflows for Data Science (WorDS) Center of Excellence and WIFIRE Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD. She has worked on different aspects of scientific workflows as a principal investigator and in other leadership roles across a wide range of cross-disciplinary projects. She is a co-initiator of and an active contributor to the open-source Kepler Scientific Workflow System.

Dr. Yvonne Andres is the President and CEO of the Global SchoolNet Foundation, Founder of the Global Schoolhouse and is the former Vice President of Internet Learning Programs and Partnerships at Lightspan, Inc. She was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2017 for her work and global social impact. An educator for nearly two decades, she has taught pre-school through university and is dedicated to demonstrating and documenting the power of "Internet style learning."

Jessica Block is the Associate Director for Operational Programs of the WIFIRE Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD. Her work aims to mitigate disasters using emerging technologies including satellites, sensor networks, machine learning tools, and virtual reality. She has spent her career addressing fire, water, and geologic risks in the American West and Southeastern Australia. In 2019, she was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to the California Wildfire Safety Advisory Board.

Somya Sharma Chatterjee is a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She is working on applications of statistical machine learning to solve climate sciences problems. Under the supervision of Dr. Vipin Kumar and Dr. Snigdhansu Chatterjee, she is working on utilizing Bayesian spatio-temporal and physics-informed deep learning techniques to address estimation and inference challenges for uncertainty quantification.

Weizhe Chen is currently a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC), where his advisor is Dr. Bistra Dilkina. His research interest lies in artificial intelligence, including machine learning, optimization, decision making, multi-agent systems, and computational sustainability. He is especially interested in machine learning with optimization objectives and optimization with machine learning surrogates.

Dr. Laura Condon is an assistant professor in the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences at Arizona University. She is interested in large-scale water sustainability and the dynamic behavior of managed hydrologic systems in the context of past development and future climate change. Her work combines physically based numerical modeling with observations and statistical techniques to evaluate large systems using rigorous quantitative methods.

Dr. Daniel Crawl is the Associate Director for Products of the WIFIRE Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD. He is one of the lead developers of the Kepler Scientific Workflow System and has advanced experience in working with applications of workflows in bioinformatics, geoinformatics, oceanography, and computational physics. He is the lead architect for the overall integration of many modules in Kepler including distributed data parallel (DDP) execution patterns.

Dr. Raymond de Callafon is a professor with the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE), UCSD. His teaching and research cover many aspects of signal processing, estimation, experiment-based modeling, and adaptive control. Dr. de Callafon designs and analyzes experiment-based modeling techniques for control relevant identification of linear systems and extends these techniques to specific classes of (block) non-linear and linear parameter varying (LPV) systems.

Turin Dickman is a staff scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Division at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL). Her current research applies her expertise in plant ecophysiology to understand the live fuel moisture and structure dynamics that influence fire behavior and ecological fire effects. Her work is supporting the integration of live fuel moisture models into FIRETEC and providing field data to validate 3D fuel structure and moisture simulations.

Dr. Bistra Dilkina is the Co-Director of the University of Southern California (USC) Center for AI in Society (CAIS), a joint effort between the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. She is one of the junior faculty leaders in the young field of computational sustainability and her research focuses on advancing the state of the art in combinatorial optimization techniques for solving real-world large-scale problems, particularly ones that arise in sustainability areas.

Charles Erwin is a research project manager and digital media designer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. He works closely with Drs. İlkay Altıntaş, Larry Smarr and Thomas DeFanti, and their respective teams on a number of cyberinfrastructure and data visualization projects. Additionally, Erwin develops web-based applications and works with wireless gestural interfaces to reimagine human interactions with big datasets.

Melissa Floca is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at the CICORE Division of the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego. In her role, she brings together policymakers, practitioners, and researchers around complex challenges that require cyberinfrastructure and digital technologies for solutions at scale. She works on a range of research projects and experiential education efforts related to disaster response and mitigation.

James H. Furman serves as a USFS liaison to the U.S. Department of Defense. He previously served as Chief of the Air Force Wildland Fire Center (AFWFC) and as Eglin Air Force Base's (Eglin AFB) Wildland Fire Program Manager. Eglin AFB's prescribed fire program tripled its productivity under his leadership, becoming a national leader with an average of approximately 125 prescribed fires and more than 100,000 acres/year over the last five years of his tenure there.

Dr. Yolanda Gil is the Senior Director for Major Strategic AI and Data Science Initiatives at USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI). As principal scientist, they lead the Interactive Knowledge Capture research group, which is part of AI@ISI. Their research focuses on intelligent interfaces for knowledge capture, which is a central topic in our projects concerning knowledge-based planning and problem solving, semantic annotation, agent and software choreography, and information analysis and assessment of trust.

J. Kevin Hiers is an associate scientist at Tall Timbers Research Station where he leads wildland fire research and training applications. For more than 25 years, he has worked at the interface between management and science. His program applies research to support the safe and effective use of prescribed fire through research on interacting fire lines, fire-atmospheric feedback driving smoke transport, and mechanistic understanding of fire effects. He is one of the co-founders of the Prescribed Fire Science Consortium.

Jenny Lee is a user interface and user experience developer with the WIFIRE Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD. She works on the user research, product design, and front-end development across multiple fire and landslide management and mitigation products, including BurnPro3D and Firemap. Jenny has a computational research background in bioinformatics and has experience leading the interface design and iOS development for early stage startups.

Samuel Leventhal is a Ph.D. candidate studying computer science at the University of Utah within the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute under Dr. Valerio Pascucci and a research collaborator with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. His research interests include the interpretability of artificial intelligence and the application and/or development of topologically informed machine learning models, as well as the theoretical foundation and capabilities of quantum computing from a categorical or functional perspective.

Dr. Rodman Linn is the Associate Director for Fire Science of the WIFIRE Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD, and a senior scientist in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Division at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL). For over two decades, he has served as principal investigator for a process-based coupled fire/atmosphere model, FIRETEC. He leads LANL efforts to use next-generation process-based wildfire models for the study of fundamental wildfire behavior and the evaluation of prescribed fire tactics.

Dr. David Marvin is the Co-Founder & CEO of Salo Sciences, Inc. He is an expert in conservation policy and forest carbon mapping, and previously worked at the Carnegie Institution for Science’s Department of Global Ecology and The Nature Conservancy (TNC). At TNC, he led a comprehensive report that evaluated the potential for natural climate solutions to increase carbon sequestration and offset the state’s emissions, which is now used to guide California’s policies reducing emissions from natural and working lands.

Dr. Aaron Maxwell is an assistant professor of geography in the Department of Geology and Geography at West Virginia University. Prior to teaching, he served as a remote sensing analyst at the Natural Resource Analysis Center (NRAC) at West Virginia University, where he worked on mapping and geospatial modeling tasks related to natural resource management. His research interests include land cover mapping, machine learning, LiDAR, image analysis, geomorphology, and landscape change.

Dr. Mai Nguyen is the Associate Director for AI of the WIFIRE Lab and the Lead for Data Analytics at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD. Her research centers on applying artificial intelligence, deep/machine learning, and data science techniques to interdisciplinary problems. She has worked in many domains, including remote sensing, spacecraft autonomy, satellite image processing, medical image analysis, knowledge extraction from text, and object detection and data analysis for wildfire mitigation.

Dr. Michael Pazzani is a distinguished scientist at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute at UCSD. He conducts research in machine learning, explainable AI (a topic in which he currently runs a DARPA-sponsored project), personalization, internet search, and recommendation systems. His scholarship is in areas including causal inference and Bayesian statistics. Prior to joining UCSD, Dr. Pazzani was the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development at UCR.

Ismael Perez is a computational and data science research specialist with the Workflows for Data Science (WorDS) Center of Excellence and WIFIRE Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD. He is currently developing cyberinfrastructure that links distributed computing with edge computing under the project Sage: A Software Defined Sensor Network. His research interests are edge computing, distributed computing, parallel computing, and composable systems.

Varun Ratnakar is the Director of Karya Ltd., London and a research consultant for USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI). As a consultant with ISI, he has worked on workflow composition for the Model Integration through Knowledge-Rich Data and Process Composition project, also known as MINT. He has worked in various AI research projects pertaining to knowledge representation, knowledge acquisition, knowledge graphs and semantic workflows.

Rukmini Ravi serves as the project coordinator of the WIFIRE Lab at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD. She assists in establishing partnerships between the WIFIRE Lab and the greater fire science and AI communities, and in communicating technical data and fire science concepts to multidisciplinary audiences. She is primarily involved with the BurnPro3D project and communication and outreach efforts for Firemap. 

David Robinson is a Ph.D. student at Florida State University, studying computational fire dynamics. David also works as a graduate research assistant at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL), under the guidance of Dr. Rodman Linn. His research at LANL has focused on the incorporation of topography into the wind solver and fire routines of the QUIC-Fire model. David's research interests include scientific visualization and the development of fast-running algorithms for use in operational models.

Dr. Daniel Roten is a computational data scientist at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD where he works on multiple research projects at the intersection of natural hazards and data-intensive computing. Previously, he was a computational seismologist at San Diego State University and co-developed the AWP-ODC wave propagation code with SDSC's High-performance Geocomputing Lab (HPGeoC). He also has experience in the use of deep learning for the prediction of earthquake shaking.

Dr. Lucas Wells is the Founder and CEO of Holtz Forestry, LLC, a company specializing in algorithm design, mathematical optimization, artificial intelligence and remote sensing, with the goal of integrating new technologies into the natural resource industry. He currently lives in Missoula, MT, where he manages a team of engineers who are currently developing new tools for modeling wildland fire fuels and designing AI-based workflows for large-scale forest inventory.

Dr. James Ahrens is the Director of the Information Science and Technology Institute (ISTI) and a senior scientist at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL). He is also the Founder and Design Lead of ParaView, an open-source visualization tool designed to handle extremely large data. ParaView has been downloaded over two million times, and is in use at supercomputing and scientific centers worldwide. His primary research interests are visualization, computer graphics, and parallel systems.

Rohan Patil is a master's student studying computer science and specializing in artificial intelligence at UCSD, where he is a part of Dr. Rose Yu's Spatiotemporal Machine Learning Research Group. His research interests include exploring deep learning techniques for modeling dynamical systems, and reducing the computational footprint of deep learning models. During his undergraduate career, he worked on gravitational wave detection and modeling the spread of COVID-19.

Eshwar Prasad Sivaramakrishnan is a master's student at the University of Southern California (USC) Viterbi School of Engineering, specializing in artificial intelligence. He is conducting research in the domain of optimization, under the guidance of Dr. Bistra Dilkina and Ph.D. student Weizhe Chen. His contributions to research projects include prototyping, and the building and testing of multi-objective optimization algorithms and evolutionary algorithms for risk mitigation.