Steven S. Skiena is a Distinguished Teaching Professor of Computer Science at Stony Brook University. His research interests include the design of graph, string, and geometric algorithms, and their applications to natural language processing and biology. He is the author of four books, including "The Algorithm Design Manual" and "Calculated Bets: Computers, Gambling, and Mathematical Modeling to Win".

He is co-founder and Chief Scientist at General Sentiment, a media measurement company based on his Lydia text/sentiment analysis system.

Skiena received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois in 1988, and the author of over 130 technical papers. He is a former Fulbright scholar, and recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award and the IEEE Computer Science and Engineer Teaching Award.

Ruhul's research interests focus on the development of deep learning and data driven approaches to solve interesting problems in Bioinformatics, Computational Social Science and Information Security. His contributions in Bioinformatics spans a wide variety of topics, ranging from designing fast heuristics for aligning reads to the application of deep learning for genome wide annotation. As a graduate fellow in the Institute for Advanced Computational Science (IACS) at Stony Brook University, he is leading multiple collaborative research projects both in Translational Research and Computational Social Science.

Junting Ye is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at Stony Brook University (SBU). His research interests are in the fields of data mining and applied machine learning, particularly on anomaly detection, large-scale news and social media analysis.

Haochen Chen is a final Year PhD candidate in the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University, supervised by Prof. Steven Skiena. His research interests include data mining (large-scale graph mining in particular), machine learning and representation learning.

Alisa is a 4th year PhD student in the Data Science Lab. She is interested in algorithms in computational biology and applying machine learning to biological data. Alisa worked on analysis of single cell and bulk RNA-seq data, analysis of genome composition, phylogenetics, and gene design for vaccines.

Syed Fahad Sultan is a second year PhD student working in computational neuroscience, on a collaborative project with the LCNeuro lab in the Biomedical Engineering department. He is working towards coming up with dynamic graph embeddings for fMRI data that encode the evolution of functional connectivity of the brain in response to different energy constraints. Originally from Pakistan, he lived in Saudi Arabia for a couple of years before moving to Stony Brook for his PhD.

Charuta is a 2nd year PhD student in the Data Science Lab. She is developing approaches for user characterization on social media, along with scoring and ranking techniques for identification of unusual content. Prior to Stony Brook, she completed her BTech in Computer Engineering from College of Engineering Pune, India. Her undergraduate research was focused on improving the quality of mobile network services, by means of personalized user route prediction and mobile tower localisation.