Pengsheng Ji is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Georgia. He holds a Ph.D. in Statistics from Cornell University, as well as M.S. and B.S. degrees in Statistics and Mathematics from Nankai University. His research spans social networks, graph data, machine learning, big data analytics, bibliometrics, bioinformatics, and infectious disease epidemiology. Dr. Ji’s recent publications appear in premier venues such as AAAI, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Journal of Machine Learning Research, and Scientific Reports. His scholarly contributions include work on graph neural networks, community detection, and text analysis, reflecting a strong engagement with methodological advances in modern data science.

Dr. Ji has received several distinctions for his research, including the M. G. Michael Award from the University of Georgia and discussion paper selections in the Annals of Applied Statistics and Journal of Business & Economic Statistics. As an educator, he emphasizes building intuition and insight through step-by-step discovery, fostering students’ ability to connect statistical reasoning with practical data-driven problem solving. His approach reflects a commitment to mentoring the next generation of data scientists and advancing the understanding of complex systems through rigorous statistical modeling.

Dr. Davis's research is broadly in applied ethics, with a current focus on ethical issues surrounding the use of big data technologies by institutions that are typically thought to have justified claims to the use of force—in particular, the criminal justice system, police departments, and the military. His research explores a range of moral challenges posed by the increasing use of algorithms by these institutions, such as the impact on trust and institutional legitimacy, whether specific actors are morally justified in relying on these systems within these institutional structures, and what factors can and should be incorporated into these predictive systems.

Anna Abraham, Ph.D. is the E. Paul Torrance Professor at the Department of Educational Psychology and the Director of the Torrance Center for Creativity and Talent Development at UGA’s Mary Frances Early College of Education. She is the Program Coordinator for the Interdisciplinary Certificate in Creativity and Innovation (ICCI). She also serves as a Neuroscience faculty member of the Integrated Life Sciences Program (ILS) and is an affiliate of the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research (OIBR). She leads the Creativity and Imagination Lab at UGA.

Dr. Abraham’s educational and professional training has been within the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience. She has worked across a diverse range of academic institutions and departments the world over, all of which have informed her multidisciplinary focus. She investigates the psychological and neurophysiological mechanisms underlying creativity and other aspects of the human imagination, including the reality-fiction distinction, mental time travel, social and self-referential cognition, and mental state reasoning. She has penned numerous publications including the book, The Neuroscience of Creativity (2018, Cambridge University Press), and the multidisciplinary edited volume, The Cambridge Handbook of the Imagination (2020). She is the Founding Editor of an innovative short book series, the Cambridge Elements in Creativity and Imagination.

Dr. Jooyoung Kim is a Professor of Advertising in Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. He is also the Executive Director of the Business and Public Communication Fellows Program in cooperation with Cox International Center for Mass Communication Training and Research. Dr. Kim’s research seeks to advance the scientific knowledge on understanding the interactions between advertising and consumers across the media platforms, including emerging digital media such as the metaverse. His research activities include numerous conference presentations, invited speeches at academic and business venues, and many publications in leading advertising journals such as the Journal of Advertising and the International Journal of Advertising. He was the Secretary of the American Academy of Advertising in 2021-2022 and is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Interactive Advertising.

Brian M. Hopkinson holds a Ph.D. in Oceanography (2007) from the University of California, San Diego and a B.S. in Chemistry (2001) from the College of William & Mary. His research spans biological oceanography and climate change, with a focus on the biology and physiology of photosynthetic marine organisms—primarily phytoplankton and corals. His lab investigates how these organisms acquire and process inorganic carbon for photosynthesis and calcification, and how environmental conditions—including rising seawater CO₂ associated with ocean acidification—shape these ecophysiological processes.

The Hopkinson Lab studies the ecology and physiology of photosynthetic ocean organisms, emphasizing mechanisms of carbon acquisition and their implications for growth and biogeochemical cycling. Additional topics include iron limitation and acquisition in phytoplankton, photosynthetic physiology, and the ecology of phytoplankton and corals. Selected publications include work on ocean acidification and iron availability to marine phytoplankton (Science, 2010), the efficiency of diatom CO₂-concentrating mechanisms (PNAS, 2011), carbon assimilation in Symbiodinium (Coral Reefs, 2014), and CO₂-concentrating mechanisms in Prochlorococcus (Plant Physiology, 2014).

Dr. Carolina A. de Lima Salge is an Assistant Professor of Management Information Systems at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia. Her research examines how individuals interact with computer algorithms in social and organizational contexts, with an emphasis on ethical and behavioral dimensions.

Her work explores topics such as the role of bots in online social networks, the use of conversational agents in increasingly private digital environments, and questions surrounding algorithmic transparency. Dr. Salge’s research has been recognized through teaching and research awards and has been featured in outlets such as The Irish Times. She is fluent in Portuguese and Spanish.

Yuri Balashov is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Georgia, where he teaches and researches in philosophy of science and artificial intelligence, philosophy of language and linguistics, translation studies, metaphysics, and logic. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame and a background in physics, which informs his interdisciplinary work. Dr. Balashov’s current research explores the intersection of philosophy of language, computational linguistics, cognitive science, and AI, focusing on the relationship between human and machine translation.

His publications include “The Boundaries of Meaning: A Case Study on Neural Machine Translation” (Inquiry, 2022) and “The Translator’s Extended Mind” (Minds & Machines, 2020), among others. He is also the author of Persistence and Spacetime (Oxford University Press, 2010). Through his scholarship, Dr. Balashov examines how meaning and understanding are shaped across human and artificial systems, contributing to ongoing conversations at the intersection of language, cognition, and computation.