Diego Alvarado, Instructional Assistant Professor

Diego Alvarado is an Instructional Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Education at the University of Florida. He obtained his M.Eng. in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University and his B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M University. His research interests involve engineering education research for video development to increase engagement and methods to teach artificial intelligence and machine learning in higher education.

David Gray Grant, Ph.D.

Dr. Grant is an assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of Florida. His research focuses on ethical challenges that arise when organizations use automated systems to make high-stakes decisions. Dr. Grant was previously a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, where he helped found the Embedded EthiCS @ Harvard program. Embedded EthiCS @ Harvard is a joint effort between philosophy and computer science that develops ethics modules for courses across the computer science curriculum. He completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at MIT.

Lyndal Grant, Ph.D.

Dr. Grant earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at MIT and was a graduate fellow with the Embedded EthiCS program at Harvard. She worked on ethics, metaethics, and philosophy of mind (and especially on problems that span all three). Her research focuses on desires: their content, their role in motivation, and their theoretical role in ethics. Dr. Grant is presently a lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the University of Florida.

Rodrigo Borges, Ph.D.

Dr. Borges is a lecturer in philosophy. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Rutgers University. He works mainly in epistemology, but also has interests in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and in the history of philosophy (especially Plato and Descartes). Dr. Borges is currently pursuing the research project Knowledge and Reasoning. The goal is to produce new insights into the role of knowledge in theoretical reasoning. The project is ambitious and it involves traditional and formal epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and psychology.

Molly Gardner, Ph.D.

Dr. Gardner is an assistant professor of philosophy. She specializes in ethics and has written extensively about issues involving harm, including what it means to harm someone and which considerations affect the strength of the reason against harming. She regularly teaches classes on bioethics, normative ethics, and related topics.

Duncan Purves, Ph.D.

Dr. Purves is an assistant professor of philosophy. He specializes in ethics, especially ethical issues concerning artificial intelligence and the treatment of non-human animals. His past work was on ethical issues related to so-called 'autonomous weapons systems,' weapons that can target enemies without human oversight. He now has an NSF grant to investigate the ethical dimensions of predictive policing algorithms, which are being used to identify places and people at the highest risk of crime. Some of the ethical concerns he is looking at include discriminatory impacts and community distrust. He also has significant work on theoretical issues related to the nature and normative significance of harm.

Amber Ross Ph.D.

Dr. Ross is an assistant professor of philosophy. Her research focuses on the philosophy and ethics of AI, including issues in the philosophy of mind and consciousness that pertain to humans, non-human animals, and artificial systems. She works on ethical issues both inherent to AI itself and specific to current applications of AI. Regarding current applications of AI algorithms, Dr. Ross is investigating the role AI plays in generating personalized media feeds for individual consumers and the threats that increasing personalization pose to a well-functioning democracy.

Elizabeth Palmer, Ph.D.

Dr. Palmer received her doctorate in philosophy with a minor in linguistics from Indiana University in 2013. A specialist in epistemology, she has regularly taught the course “Ethics and Innovation” for students in the University of Florida’s Innovation Academy.

Paul Gader, Ph.D.

Dr. Gader’s research has ranged from Mathematics to Operational Machine Learning Algorithms beginning with the development of algorithms for detecting bridges in FLIR imagery in 1984. He has been a Senior Research Scientist at Honeywell’s Systems and Research Center; Research Engineer and Manager at the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM); and on the faculties of the Universities of Wisconson-Oshkosh, Missouri (ECE), CS, and Florida (CISE), EESIE. He has also been a Visiting Professor at the Grenoble Institute of Technology in France and at the University of California – Santa Barbara (CS), Viper Lab.

A leading figure in handwriting recognition and landmine detection, he led the development of a 5th ranked handwritten character recognizer and a top-ranked handwritten word recognizer in two National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) competitions. He led teams that devised and implemented Hidden Markov Model and Possibilistic detectors in real-time on a Husky-Mounted Mine Detection System fielded in Afghanistan. The systems with his team’s algorithms are featured in a National Geographic television program: “Bomb Hunters: Afghanistan.”

He has been researching hyperspectral algorithms, or algorithms for imaging spectroscopy, initially working on land-mine detection using LWIR hyperspectral; planning and conducting multiple VIS/NIR/SWIR and LiDAR airborne data collections. His research has focused on unmixing, dimensionality reduction, material detection, and classification, using both physics-based and data-driven nonlinear models.

Catia Silva, Ph.D.

Dr. Silva is an Instructional Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering department , focusing her expertise on machine learning, data science and engineering education research.

Before coming to UF, Dr. Silva earned her B.S. in applied mathematics from the University of Porto in 2010. She then completed her M.S. in biomedical engineering at the University of Porto in 2012, which allowed her to applied her rigorous training in biomedical applications. Her Master’s thesis integrated principles of data science and machine learning to perform feature extraction and classification of dermoscopic images.

She worked as a research scientist at INESC TEC, Portugal, in the Power and Energy Systems Unit, where she worked on wind and solar energy power forecasting. Her work focused on the foundational development of machine learning tools for energy forecasting. She participated in an international collaborative project with the Argonne National Laboratory.

Dr. Silva moved to Gainesville in 2013 and received her Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Florida in 2018 under the mentorship of the distinguished professor Dr. Jose C. Principe in the Computational NeuralEngineering Laboratory (CNEL). She developed a system to quantify spatiotemporal neural activity. Before returning to UF as a faculty member in the Fall 2019, Dr. Silva was a research scientist at Aventusoft, a startup company in south Florida, working on an automatic cardiovascular assessment system.

Jason Harrington

Dr. Harrington is a lecturer at the UF Department of Mathematics. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Western Kentucky University (2004), Master of Science from the University of Florida (2006), and Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Florida (2010).

His research interests are centered primarily around dynamical systems and topology.

Zhihua (Sophia) Su

Dr. Su is an Associate Professor in the Department of Statistics. She earned B.S. in Mathematics in 2006 from Fudan University and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Minnesota in 2012.

Her main research interests are in the areas of multivariate analysis, dimension reduction, and model selection.

Farid AitSahlia, Ph.D.

Farid AitSahlia is a Clinical Assistant Professor and James G. Richardson Faculty Fellow in the finance department of the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida. He received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from Stanford University. Farid is the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Risk and serves on the editorial board of the book series Modern Trends in Financial Engineering for World Scientific.

Farid’s research focus has been in the area of computational methods for pricing and hedging financial derivatives, risk-return tradeoff in the context of investments retirement, and market microstructure. He teaches courses on asset pricing, corporate finance, investments, and derivatives in the Ph.D., MBA, and MSF programs.

Prior to joining UF, Farid spent a significant part of his career in Silicon Valley, working for Hewlett-Packard and two start-ups, Financial Engines, a pioneer in algorithmic investment allocation in retirement accounts, and DemandTec, an early developer of data-intensive approaches to optimize retail pricing and product promotion. Both firms have become major companies in their spaces, Financial Engines merging with Edelman to become the largest independent financial advisor in the U.S., and DemandTec being acquired by IBM into its Analytics group.

Jim Hoover, Ph.D., MBA

Jim Hoover is a Clinical Professor with an extensive commercial background in operations research and business analytics. He serves as the Director of the Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Center at the University of Florida. He received his Doctor of Business Administration from the University of Florida. He has published in numerous journals, but much of his research has been in Forecasting with business and supply chain applications. Jim also currently serves as the Chair of the Foresight Advisory Board overseeing the reach of this journal in the forecasting practitioner community.

Jim’s teaching efforts have been focused on the application of business analytics and artificial intelligence to solve critical tasks across business domains. He teaches an analytics practicum series of courses where student teams receive real world business problems from partner companies and develop analytics, AI and ML solutions to those problems. Then the student teams develop presentations for company leadership to brief their model results and recommend implementation approaches. In addition to the practicum curriculum, Jim also teaches marketing analytics courses for graduate students at the Warrington College of Business at UF.

Prior to joining the faculty at UF, Jim spent 25 years in the U.S. Navy working in Supply Chain Management and Operations Research. Then, he joined the international management and IT consulting firm Accenture where he was a Managing Director and Client Account Lead. During his 10 years at Accenture, Jim also served as the head of the Federal Analytics practice where he was responsible for the development of the practice, hiring and training of data scientists, and quality assurance of analytics projects.

Anuj Kumar, Ph.D.

Anuj Kumar is an Associate Professor and Matherly Professor of Information Systems at the Warrington College of Business, University of Florida. He holds a Ph.D. in Information Systems from Heinz School of Information Systems and Management, Carnegie Mellon University. He also has a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Master’s degree in Thermal Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, India, and a Master’s degree in management from the Indian Institute of Management, India.

Anuj's research focuses on understanding how information technology affects organizations, individuals, and the interactions between them. Specifically, his research has examined the role of information technology in three areas: (1) omnichannel customer behavior in technology-mediated multi-channel operations, such as retail of traditional goods (apparel and home goods), digital goods (digital movies and music), and after-sales services in the insurance sector; (2) the economic value of online product recommendation networks in e-commerce, and (3) how technology shapes our society, such as remedying education with the use of technologies. Professor Kumar has designed natural, quasi-natural, and large-scale randomized experiments in real-life field settings to answer these questions.

Anuj has been awarded the ISS Sandra A. Slaughter INFORMS Early Career Award in 2018 for his research in Information Systems. His research has also received several competitive research grants from the Marketing Science Institute and Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative. His papers have received best paper awards from INFORMS-Industries Association awards and Workshop of Information Systems and Economics. His research has been mentioned in popular media outlets such as The New York Times,74 million.org, and Total Retail. Professor Kumar gave a TEDx talk in Boston Bio hub on online school ratings and segregation in America. His research has been published in top-tier journals like Management Science, Information Systems Research, Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and Management Information Systems Quarterly.

Asoo J. Vakharia, Ph.D.

Asoo J. Vakharia is the McClatchy Professor and Director of the Center for Supply Chain Management in the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida. He has a Ph.D. in Operations Management from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Asoo is a Fellow of the Decision Sciences Institute, and the Production & Operations Management Society. He is also the recipient of the DSI Grawoig Distinguished Service Award.
Asoo’s current research focuses on sustainability, IOT, and 3-D printing. Over and above publishing his research in leading academic journals, he has also served as the editor of the Decision Sciences Journal (2010-2014) and currently is the department editor for both the Production and Operations Management Journal and Management and Business Review.

His teaching interests are primarily in Operations Management and he has taught courses in Planning and Control, Operations Strategy, International Logistics, Transportation and Logistics Systems, and MPC/ERP Systems Integration. He is involved in extensive Executive Teaching in the UFMBA programs, and has taught industry-specific Managerial Decision Analysis, Quality Analysis/Statistical Methods, Operations/Financial Analysis, and Supply Chain Analytics.
In addition to his academic experience, Asoo has been an entrepreneur and a management consultant. After joining academia, he has worked with several companies including AT&T Solutions Customer Care, e-Diets.com, Golden Eagle Distributors, Garrett Air Research, Motorola, Sweetheart Cups, Inc., University of Arizona Medical Center, and Vistakon, Inc.

Gene Witmer Ph.D.

Dr. Witmer is an associate professor of philosophy. His research focuses on metaphysics and philosophy of mind, with a special focus on physicalism. He has worked on such topics as the nature of intrinsic properties, metaphysical grounding, mental causation, functionalism, conceptual analysis, and a priori knowledge. His interests extend as well to meta-ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of religion.

Bryan Kolaczkowski, Ph.D.

Dr. Kolaczkowski completed his Ph.D. at the University of Oregon under an NSF fellowship in Evolution, Development, and Genomics. He completed postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley and Dartmouth College. Dr. Kolaczkowski is presently running a lab at the University of Florida that uses cutting-edge techniques to examine important research questions across the biological sciences. His research focuses on mining existing evolutionary-functional genomic information to learn about human disease and identify potential new drug targets.

Tie Lui Ph.D.

Dr. Liu is an Assistant Professor at the Horticultural Sciences Department/IFAS, University of Florida. He uses genetics, genomics, and systems biology tools to explore the mechanisms on how transcriptional regulators integrate environmental cues and interact with signaling pathways to modulate plant growth. His research focus is on the study of postharvest biology of broccoli senescence and potato tuber dormancy for the improvement of agronomic properties.

Denis Valle, Ph.D.

Dr. Valle is an Assistant Professor of Ecological Statistics and Environmental Health. He joined the School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences in 2013. He previously worked as an Assistant Researcher at the Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente (IMAZON) and as a consultant for the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). His research covers environmental health, plant demography, tropical forest management, simulation models, and Bayesian statistical models.

Amr Adb-Elrahman, Ph.D.

Dr. Abd-Elrahman joined the Geomatics program in April 2007. He is a School of Forest, Fisheries, and Geomatics Sciences faculty and the Geomatics program adviser in the Gulf Coast Research and Education Center (Plant City). Dr. Abd-Elrahman’s research focuses on utilizing remote sensing techniques to provide the information needed in natural resources management/monitoring and precision agriculture applications. The research program involves multispectral and hyperspectral image classification, lidar data processing, and geospatial analysis.

Won Suk (Daniel) Lee Ph.D.

Dr. Lee is a professor of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Florida. He is working on developing sensing systems for specialty crops for precision agriculture in Florida. His areas of specialization include: sensing systems, precision agriculture, farm automation, Global Positioning System (GPS), geographic information systems (GIS), near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), image processing, machine vision, yield monitoring/mapping, variable rate fertilizer application, instrumentation, machinery, and agricultural mechanization. He draws from all these areas to develop solutions for a wide range of agricultural problems.

Matias Kirst Ph.D.

Dr. Kirst is an Associate Professor of Forest Resources and Conservation. He is also a member of the Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Program (PMCB) and the University of Florida Genetics Institute (UFGI). His group in Quantitative Genomics Research is part of the Forest Genomics Laboratory. His research is focused in three areas: (1) Fundamental Genomic Research in the genetic regulation of gene expression and gene expression networks; (2) Applied Genomic Research for the discovery of genes, metabolic and regulatory networks that control variation in wood quality, growth and other important traits for the forestry and agronomic industry; and (3) Technology and genomic tool development.