UT Experts : University Communications : The University of Texas at Austin

Associate Professor , Department of Computer Science , College of Natural Sciences
, joydeepb@cs.utexas.edu

Joydeep Biswas' research areas include perception, planning, and failure recovery for autonomous mobile robots. These topics support his goal of having autonomous service mobile robots deployed on a campus to city scale, both indoors and outdoors, in real world human environments, performing assistive tasks accurately and robustly on demand, over deployments spanning years. He is most interested in tackling research problems that will directly improve long-term autonomy on real world robots deployed in human environments. Prior to joining UT Austin, Joydeep was an Assistant Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He earned his PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2014, and his B.Tech in Engineering Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay in 2008.

Professor of Practice , Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs
+1 512 471 8324, +1 512 656 6592, srgreenberg@austin.utexas.edu

Sherri Greenberg served for 10 years as a member of the Texas House of Representatives, completing her final term in January 2001. In 1999, she was appointed by the Speaker of the House to chair the House Pensions and Investments Committee, which oversees the Texas State Employee Retirement System, state employee health insurance program, Teacher Retirement System, local public employee retirement systems, and regulation of state investments and public securities. After the 1999 legislative session, the Speaker appointed her as chair of the Select Committee on Teacher Health Insurance.

Greenberg served two terms on the House Appropriations Committee, which is the House's budget writing committee, and served on the Appropriations Committee's Education and Major Information Systems Subcommittees. Other committee assignments included the House Economic Development Committee and the Welfare-to-Work Committee.

Greenberg's professional background is in public finance. She served as the Manager of Capital Finance for the City of Austin from 1985 to 1989, overseeing the City's debt management, capital budgeting, and capital improvement programs. Prior to that she worked as a Public Finance Officer for Standard & Poor's Corporation in New York, where she analyzed and assigned bond ratings to public projects across the country.

Greenberg has a B.A. in Government from UT Austin and an M.S. in Public Administration and Policy from the London School of Economics. At the LBJ School she teaches courses in public financial management, policy development, and public administration and management. Her teaching and research interests include public finance and budgeting, Texas state government, local government, health care, education, utilities, transportation, and campaigns and elections.

Professor , School of Journalism and Media , Moody College of Communication
+1 512 471 4071, +1 512 471 6676, craig.watkins@austin.utexas.edu

S. Craig Watkins is the Ernest A. Sharpe Centennial Professor and the Executive Director of the IC² Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on the technical, social, and ethical implications of artificial intelligence. His research explores the challenges of deploying AI in the context of high stakes contexts like health care. For example, he was part of a multidisciplinary team of social scientists, psychologists, and computer scientists who prototyped a chatbot to support parents dealing with postpartum depression. Watkins is part of an NIH-funded project that is exploring the design of ethical AI to address the crisis of rising rates of suicide among youth, especially Black youth. His team is also probing an NIH dataset to understand how social determinants of health influence health outcomes and health disparities. Through his leadership at the IC2 Institute, Watkins is collaborating with the Dell Medical School and UT faculty to enhance the use of artificial intelligence to address health disparities.

Craig is an internationally recognized expert in media and technology systems and the author of six books and numerous articles and book chapters. His research explores, among other things, how technological innovation built the hip-hop economy (Hip Hop Matters), the social and behavioral implications of young peoples engagement with computer-mediated technologies (The Young and the Digital), the shifting contours of the digital divide (The Digital Edge), and the creative ways young people adopt technology to navigate a precarious society and economy (Dont Knock the Hustle). This work illuminates the nuanced ways in which structural inequalities influence the design, deployment, and adoption of computer-mediated systems leading to both systemic challenges and opportunities to enhance the human experience.

Watkins work has been profiled in places as varied as the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Newsweek, TIME, ESPN, and NPR, and featured at venues like SXSW, The Aspen Institute, The Boston Federal Reserve, New York Hall of Science, MITs Media Lab, The New York Times Dialogue on Race, and the Brene Brown podcast, Unlocking Us.

UTExperts

Artificial Intelligence

Robotics

Machine Learning

Public Policy & Ethics

Transportation

Human-Computer Interaction

Space

UTExperts