Biosketches of Workshop Speakers
Kristiana Almeida has been with the American Red Cross for more than 4 years. Most recently, she has been serving as a consultant to the organization’s more than 250 socially active chapters, helping them to reach the next level of online engagement with their constituents while engaging new volunteers to help with social programs. She also serves as part of the organization’s Advanced Public Affairs Team and as such has been a key on-the-ground media spokesperson after large-scale disasters, including the tornadoes in Alabama, the historic flooding in Tennessee, and Hurricane Irene. Almeida received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she graduated with distinction in her major, and she is currently working on her MBA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Manuel Cebrian works at the intersection of the computer and social sciences. He is currently an assistant research scientist with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Prior to joining UC San Diego, Cebrian was a Fulbright Fellow with the MIT Media Laboratory. Previously, Cebrian worked with Facebook, Telefonica, and Brown University. Cebrian earned a PhD in computer science from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain.
Lorrie Faith Cranor is an associate professor of computer science and of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory
(CUPS). She is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, Inc. She has authored more than 100 research papers on online privacy, usable security, phishing, spam, electronic voting, anonymous publishing, and other topics. She has played a key role in building the usable privacy and security research community, having co-edited the seminal book Security and Usability (O’Reilly, 2005) and founded the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). She also chaired the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) Specification Working Group at the W3C and authored the book Web Privacy with P3P (O’Reilly, 2002). She has served on a number of boards, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation board of directors, and on the editorial boards of several journals. In 2003 she was named one of the top 100 innovators 35 or younger by Technology Review magazine. She was previously a researcher at AT&T-Labs Research and taught in the Stern School of Business at New York University.
Aram Dobalian is the director of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Emergency Management Evaluation Center (VEMEC) at the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System (VAGLAHS). VEMEC’s mission is to promote the health and social welfare of veterans and the nation before, during, and after national emergencies and disasters through research and evaluation. Dobalian is also an associate adjunct professor of health services at the Jonathan and Karin Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Dobalian received his PhD in health services from the UCLA School of Public Health with an academic cognate in social psychology, and his JD from Whittier Law School where he was editor-in-chief of the Whittier Law Review. He received his MPH in health services from UCLA and his BS in physics from Vanderbilt University. From 2001 to 2004, Dobalian was an assistant professor in the Department of Health Services Research, Management and Policy at the University of Florida. His research focuses on emergency management/public health emergency preparedness and response, including the impact of bioterrorism, hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural and human-caused emergencies and disasters. His research also spans nursing, long-term care, nursing home malpractice, advance care planning, and the role of pain in the use of health services. In 2009 to 2010, Dobalian led the development of the first national VA Comprehensive Emergency Management Program Evaluation and Research agenda. The goals of this agenda were to provide a basis for fostering the conduct of VA-based emergency management research, to promote new discoveries and improve care delivery during and after emergencies, and to position VA as a national leader in emergency management research.
Paul Earle currently serves as the director of operations of the USGS National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC). His primary responsibility is oversight of 24/7 earthquake monitoring. In this capacity, he guides the development and implementation of new policy and procedures used during earthquake response and catalog production. He also serves in the rotating role of NEIC event coordinator, overseeing the production of near-real-time products following earthquake disasters around the globe. Previously, Earle graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a BA in geophysics and then received a PhD in geophysics from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and had a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research has included studies of the fine-scale structure of the deep Earth, characterization of Earth’s seismic signals, and post-earthquake impact assessment as part the the USGS Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response (PAGER) project.
Melissa Elliott works to bridge the gap between technology and teamwork. She is a core team member of the Standby Task Force and has actively participated in deployments for Al-jazeera, Amnesty International USA, OCHA, UNHRC, UN-Spider, and WHO. An avid supporter of the Haitian relief efforts, Elliott was an early adopter of the Ushahidi platform to coordinate aid after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and has traveled to Haiti on multiple occasions to assist. She is a member of Crisis-Commons and CrisisMappers. She has presented social media techniques used in disaster relief to the American Red Cross during its Emergency Social Data Summit in Washington, D.C., as well as multiple presentations at the Canadian government’s Department of Foreign Trade and International Affairs during its Open Innovation Summit in Ottawa. Elliot is also a partner and executive producer at Blackbox Communications in Toronto.
Emre Gunduzhan received his BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering from Bilkent University, Turkey, and his PhD degree, also in electrical engineering, from the University of Maryland, College Park. He worked at the Advanced Technology Research Group of Nortel for more than 10 years before joining the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where he is currently a project manager in the Communication Systems Group. His current interests are modeling, analysis, and design of complex communication systems, including alert and warning systems, wireless networks, and satellite networks.
Edward Hopkins serves as director of external affairs and communications for the Maryland Emergency Management Agency (MEMA), where he oversees all external communications and liaisons, messaging, and legislative affairs. He previously served as chief of staff, deputy director of operations, and manager of MEMA’s Office of Domestic Preparedness–Law Enforcement Liaison Group, where he served as the law enforcement/intelligence liaison with all state, local, and federal law-enforcement agencies and oversaw DHS grants totaling more than $10 million. Hopkins previously served as the director of communications with Maryland’s Department of Juvenile Services, where he was responsible for external communications with the statewide news media, and developing press conferences, presentations, speeches, and talking points on behalf of former Governor Robert Ehrlich. Hopkins served with the Harford County (MD) Sheriff’s Office for 29 years and retired in 2003 as a lieutenant. From 1994 to 2002 and from 2003 to 2005 he served as director of public and media relations and chief spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office. During his career, Hopkins served as director of the Harford County Child Advocacy Center, a center for the investigation of child sexual abuse, and for 11 years was assigned to the Criminal Investigation Division, where he was a supervisor of the Major Crimes Unit. Hopkins holds a master’s degree in public administration with a minor in police management from the University of Baltimore. He has attended numerous law enforcement seminars and has participated in panel discussions regarding the role of law enforcement in public affairs. He formerly hosted and produced a cable television show entitled “Behind the Badge,” an award-winning informational show about the Harford County Sheriff’s Office, and currently hosts “Inside Harford County,” a live call-in talk show on the Harford Cable Network. Hopkins is a graduate of the FBI/Harford County Sheriff’s Office Law Enforcement Executive Development School and has served as president and vice-president of Harvard Associates in Police Science, a 600-member medico-legal death investigation educational organization. He is actively involved in the community, having served 38 years with the Bel Air Volunteer Fire Company and serving currently as fire chief. He has held the positions of board president and assistant fire chief, paramedic, and public information officer. He currently serves as chair of the Maryland Municipal League’s Hometown Emergency Preparedness Ad Hoc Committee, a subcommittee whose mission is to educate municipalities on emergency preparedness, planning, and awareness. In 2011 Hopkins was re-elected to local political office and currently serves as mayor of the Town of Bel Air, Maryland.
Brian Humphrey joined the Los Angeles Fire Department in 1985, where he has served with distinction, earning honors on the battle lines of count-
less storms, conflagrations, and disasters—including the Los Angeles riots of 1992 that caused more than $1 billion in property damage and left nearly six dozen dead. During the past 17 years, he worked full-time in external relations for the Los Angeles Fire Department, dealing firsthand with all aspects of print, radio, television, and Internet journalism. Humphrey is active in a variety of government and diplomatic affairs, including service as an LAFD terrorism liaison officer, public safety ambassador for visiting dignitaries, and manager of the popular LAFD news and information blog.
Keri M. Lubell, PhD, is the lead for the Communication Surveillance and Evaluation Team and acting lead for the Emergency Web and Social Media Team in the Emergency Risk Communication (ECS) Branch, Division of Emergency Operations, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Her current work focuses on developing efficient and effective systems for gathering information from and analyzing the communication environment (news and social media) during emergencies in order to inform agency communication strategy. She also coordinates several efforts to evaluate CDC communication outreach activities during emergency health threats, including the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. In addition to her H1N1-specific work, she serves as a scientific adviser for a CDC cooperative agreement with the Harvard School of Public Health to assess the public’s knowledge, attitudes, and behavior in response to health threats. Before joining the ECS Branch, she spent 10 years in CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention conducting research on violence-related issues and topics. Lubell received her PhD in sociology from Indiana University, Bloomington, where her dissertation research focused on gender differences in the impact of social isolation and mental health problems on suicide mortality.
Gloria Mark is a professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. Mark received her PhD in psychology from Columbia University. Previously, she was a research scientist at the German National Research Center for Information Technology (GMD), a visiting research scientist at the Boeing Company, and a research scientist at the Electronic Data Systems Center for Advanced Research. Mark’s research focuses on the use of technology to support collaboration. Her current projects include studying citizen use of social media for resilience in crises and multitasking in the workplace. A recipient of a Fulbright scholarship, Mark has published more than 100 peer-reviewed publications in the fields of human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). She is the program chair for the Association of Computing Machinery’s CSCW’12 and is on the editorial board of the ACM
Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, CSCW Journal, and Ecommerce Quarterly.
Dennis Mileti is Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he chaired the Department of Sociology and directed the Natural Hazards Center—the nation’s clearinghouse for social science research on hazards and disasters. Mileti is the author of more than 100 publications. Most of these are on the societal aspects of hazards and disasters. His book Disasters by Design summarized knowledge in all fields of science and engineering and made recommendations for shifts in national policies and programs. It became the most cited source on natural hazards in the nation and was required reading in more university emergency management courses than any other book in the nation for almost a decade. Mileti has more than four decades of research and applications experience regarding pre-event public preparedness and event-specific disaster warning response; he was awarded the U.S. Army’s Civilian Medal of Honor for his work in overseeing investigations by the Army Corps of Engineers about the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina; and he designed the National Institute of Science and Technology’s congressional study of evacuation of the World Trade Center towers on 9/11. Mileti has served on many advisory boards, including as chair of the Committee on Disasters in the National Research Council of the National Academies, chair of the Board of Visitors to FEMA’s Emergency Management Institute, a board member for the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, and an advisory council member for the Southern California Earthquake Center. He was appointed by the governor as a California seismic safety commissioner. And he has decades of experience as a consultant to the private and public sectors in matters related to emergency management, including, for example, utilities with nuclear power plants, federal and state agencies, and local governments. Mileti is currently a researcher with a Department of Homeland Security’s national center of research excellence on terrorism at the University of Maryland.
Leysia Palen is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a faculty fellow with the Institute for the Alliance of Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) and the Institute of Cognitive Science. She is the director of the Connectivity Lab and the NSF-funded Project EPIC: Empowering the Public with Information in Crisis. She examines sociotechnical systems, including coordination in online settings as well as the impacts of social computing in off-line arenas and social structures. Her most recent work is in the area of crisis informatics, although she has worked in aviation, digital privacy behavior, personal information management, mobile technology diffusion, health care, and
cultural heritage. Prior to her appointment at Colorado, she completed her PhD at the University of California, Irvine, in information and computer science and her undergraduate education in cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. In 2006, Palen was awarded an NSF Faculty Early Career Development grant for her “Data in Disaster” proposal to study information dissemination in disaster events. From 2005 to 2006, Palen was a visiting professor at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.
Brad Panovich is the chief meteorologist at WCNC-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina. He completed his BS in meteorology at Ohio State University. After OSU, he joined an NBC station in Dayton, Ohio, doing the morning shift. Given an incredible opportunity, Panovich moved to Traverse City, Michigan, to start a new weather department at a Fox affiliate. During the 2005 hurricane season, he reported on both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita, working with WWL-TV, a CBS affiliate. Panovich shares his weather knowledge on twitter, @wxbrad, and at wxbrad.com.
Paul Resnick is a professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. He previously worked as a researcher at AT&T Labs and AT&T Bell Labs, and as an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He received master’s and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan. Resnick’s research focuses on sociotechnical capital, productive social relationships that are enabled by the ongoing use of information and communication technology. His current projects include making recommender systems resistant to manipulation through rater reputations, nudging people toward politically balanced news consumption and health behavior change, and crowdsourcing fact-correction on the Internet. Resnick was a pioneer in the field of recommender systems (sometimes called collaborative filtering or social filtering). Recommender systems guide people to interesting materials based on recommendations from other people. The GroupLens system he helped develop was awarded the 2010 ACM Software Systems Award. His articles have appeared in Scientific American, Wired, Communications of the ACM, The American Economic Review, Management Science, and many other venues. He has a forthcoming MIT Press book (co-authored with Robert Kraut) titled Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-based Social Design.
Dan Roth is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a University of Illinois Scholar. He is the director of a DHS Center for Multimodal Information Access & Synthesis (MIAS) and also has faculty
positions in statistics and in linguistics and at the School of Library and Information Sciences. Roth is a fellow of the ACM and of the AAAI for his contributions to the foundations of machine learning and inference and for developing learning-centered solutions for natural-language-processing problems. He has published broadly in machine learning, natural-language processing, knowledge representation and reasoning, and learning theory and has developed advanced machine-learning-based tools for natural-language applications that are being used widely by the research community. Roth has given keynote talks at major conferences, including the AAAI’s Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing and the European Conference on Machine Learning, and has presented several tutorials in universities and conferences, including at the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and the European Association for Computational Linguistics. Roth was the program chair of AAAI’11, the Conference on Natural Language Learning’02, and ACL’03; is or has been on the editorial board of several journals in his research areas; and has won several teaching and paper awards. Roth received his BA summa cum laude in mathematics from the Technion, Israel, and his PhD in computer science from Harvard University.
W. David Stephenson is principal of Stephenson Strategies (Medfield, Mass.) and an internationally recognized theorist and consultant on the use of mobile devices and social media in preventing and responding to natural disasters and terrorist attacks. Among other accomplishments, he has designed emergency communications strategies for the Wireless Foundation and National Public Radio. He created the first comprehensive guide to terrorism and disasters for smart phones, “The Terrorism Survival Planner.” Stephenson is also an international thought leader in the field of open data and the Internet of Things, having written Data Dynamite: How Liberating Information Will Transform Our World. He is a graduate of Haverford College and earned an MA from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University.
Peter P. Swire is the C. William O’Neill Professor of Law at the Moritz College of Law of Ohio State University. He is a senior fellow with the Future of Privacy Forum and is also a fellow with the Center for American Progress and Center for Democracy and Technology. He has been a recognized leader in privacy, cybersecurity, and the law of cyberspace for well over a decade, as a scholar, government official, and participant in numerous policy, public interest, and business settings. From 2009 until August 2010 Swire was special assistant to the President for economic policy, serving in the National Economic Council under Lawrence Summers. From 1999 to early 2001 Swire served as the Clinton Administration’s
chief counselor for privacy, in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, as the only person to date to have government-wide responsibility for privacy issues. Among his other activities when at OMB, Swire was the White House coordinator for the HIPAA Medical Privacy Rule, led a White House working group on how to update wiretap laws for the Internet age, and led a project on public records and privacy. Swire is lead author of Information Privacy: Official Reference for the Certified Information Privacy Professional. Many of his writings appear at www.peterswire.net.
Murray Turoff is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is a co-editor of the recent book Emergency Management Information Systems (M.E. Sharp, 2010). Besides his early and continuing work with the Delphi method, he spent most of his academic research career in the design and evaluation of computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems. He designed the first collaborative emergency management information system used to manage the wage price freeze in 1971 and many shortages and natural disasters over the following decade. He was with the Office of Emergency Preparedness until 1973. In 1973 he joined NJIT, where he developed the EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System), an operational CMC system for field trials of alternative real user communities which operated until the mid-1990s at NJIT. This effort was sponsored by NSF to support emerging “invisible colleges.” A great many communities of practice started on EIES as well as very early work on online learning, including the design and application of the first major virtual classroom system. He is co-author of the book The Network Nation with Roxanne Hiltz in 1978 (revised edition 1993, MIT Press), which predicted many features and applications of the current Internet. After 9/11 he turned his attention to his early work in emergency management and related work in planning and foresight and Delphi design. In 2004, he was a cofounder of the international organization ISCRAM (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management).
Bryan Ware is chief company strategist, lead designer, and primary developer of Digital Sandbox, Inc.’s patented terrorist risk algorithms and is also responsible for designing the breakthrough DS7 product line and its underlying predictive analytics platform. He has been at the forefront of national innovation in risk analytics for more than 15 years, leading threat mitigation technologies for terrorist attacks and helping to identify and overcome military vulnerabilities, protect against bioterrorism, boost infrastructure protection, contend with drug trafficking, and address weapons of mass destruction. A frequent speaker, he is consulted regularly by government and industry executives on security and analytical
risk management issues. Ware holds a bachelor of science in applied optics from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.
Duncan Watts is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a founding member of the MSR-NYC lab. From 2000 to 2007, he was a professor of sociology at Columbia University, and then, prior to joining Microsoft, a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research, where he directed the Human Social Dynamics group. He is a former external professor of the Santa Fe Institute and is currently a visiting fellow at Columbia University and at Nuffield College, Oxford. His research on social networks and collective dynamics has appeared in a wide range of journals, from Nature, Science, and Physical Review Letters to the American Journal of Sociology and Harvard Business Review. He is also the author of three books: Small Worlds: The Dynamics of Networks Between Order and Randomness (Princeton, 1999), Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Norton, 2003), and, most recently, Everything Is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer) (Crown Business, 2011). He holds a BSc in physics from the Australian Defence Force Academy, from which he also received his officer’s commission in the Royal Australian Navy, and a PhD in theoretical and applied mechanics from Cornell University.
