Abstract

Quantum phenomena provide computing and information handling paradigms that are different and much more powerful than their classical counterparts. Quantum correlation (entanglement) is the central concept behind the celebrated teleportation and secret key agreement protocols. This talk will describe the role that correlation, independence, and interdependence play in quantum key distribution. It will then argue that these are crucial skills for (female) researchers and educators.

Biography

Emina Soljanin has been a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers since January 2016. Before moving to Rutgers, she was a (Distinguished) Member of Technical Staff for 21 years in various incarnations of the Mathematical Sciences Research Center of Bell Labs. Her interests and expertise are broad, currently ranging from distributed computing to quantum information science. She is an IEEE Fellow, an outstanding alumnus of the Texas A&M School of Engineering, the 2011 Padovani Lecturer, a 2016/17 Distinguished Lecturer, and the 2019 President of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

Abstract

Rabab Kreidieh Ward grew up in a Moslem family in Lebanon, and has worked there as well as in Zimbabwe and North America. A specialist in the field of signal processing, she has had to overcome many hurdles in the course of a career in engineering that began as an engineering student in the early 1960s. For much of her working life she was the only woman in otherwise all-male academic departments. In this talk she recalls some of her formative professional experiences, why she loves academia, how she achieved her goals, and discusses some of the exciting developments and applications in electrical engineering that have kept her curiosity sharp over decades.

Biography

Dr. Rabab Kreidieh Ward is a Professor Emeritus in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of British Columbia, Canada. A Fellow of IEEE, Royal Society of Canada and Foreign Member of the USA National Academy of Engineering, she was the first woman holding a Ph.D. that was appointed as professor in engineering in Canada. She has over 40 years of post-doctoral experience in education, research and leadership. She has supervised around 50 Ph.D. and 50 Master students. Her research contributions are in broad areas of signal processing, including signal detection, image encoding, and restoration, and their applications in cable TV, HDTV, medical imaging, infant cry signals, and brain computer interfaces. Dr. Ward has published over 670 refereed journal and conference papers, and holds eight patents related to monitoring, measurement, and noise reduction concerning cable television. Some of her work has been licensed to US and Canadian industry.

She has served in leadership positions as Director of the (UBC) Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems (1996-2007) and as the Research Coordinator in UBC VP Research and International Office (2008- 2014). She was the 2016-2017 President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and is presently serving on the IEEE Board of Directors (as Director, Division 1X) .

Abstract

Dr. Sameena Shah has built AI technologies to transform financial services, journalism, operations and legal industries. In this talk, she will share how key learnings from her experience. Specially, she will shed light on how we need to transition from thinking about specific algorithms to eventual customer of AI. This leads to thinking about AI in conjunction with human interactions, domain expertise, data and technology.

Biography

Sameena Shah is a Managing Director in AI Research group at JPMorgan. She is a highly accomplished technology leader with over 20 years of educational and industry experience in engineering, AI, and leading development teams that created top AI technologies in the world for financial, news, commodities and legal businesses.

Previously, Sameena was Managing Director, Head of Data Science at S&P Global Ratings where she led the firm’s strategy and development for Augmented Intelligence. Prior to that, Sameena worked at Thomson Reuters for seven years in roles of increasing responsibility that involved building state of the art AI systems resulting in business growth and operational efficiencies. Sameena is also the Founder and CEO of Aylan Analytics LLC, and has worked at Yahoo! Research, a NYC based hedge fund, an International hedge fund, and a global startup.

Sameena has a PhD in Distributed Machine Learning and a Masters in Computer Science from IIT Delhi. She is the winner of the top PhD in the country award, Cloudera top AI/ML application award, several best paper awards and recognitions. She has contributed 41 Publications, and 11 Patents.