The Boston University Alumni Association along with the College of Engineering and College of Arts and Sciences invite you to a special reception and panel event in San Francisco – Big Data, Analytics & the Impact on Society.
From cloud computing and machine learning to digital humanities and computational social sciences, from personalized manufacturing and medicine to smart cities and intelligent homes powered by the smart grid — the harnessing of data science, analytics, and algorithms are dramatically transforming our lives and society. This panel will explore the ways in which research, education and emerging innovations in engineering and the arts and sciences will impact all of us. The discussion will also cover how to grapple with tough questions regarding ethical, legal, and privacy concerns.
Join your fellow Bay Area alumni for a pre-panel reception featuring open beer, wine and light hors d’oeuvres.
Registration will include access to both the reception and the panel event. Space is limited.
Event Schedule
6:30pm: Reception
7:30pm: Panel Begins
Panelists Include*
Ann Cudd, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences & Professor of Philosophy
Ann E. Cudd became Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences on August 1, 2015. She is also appointed as Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Boston University.
Prior to coming to BU, she was Vice Provost and Dean of Undergraduate Studies and University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kansas. While at Kansas she oversaw the development and launch of a new university-wide, learning outcome based, general education curriculum. As Vice Provost she supervised first year experiences, undergraduate research, and advising services for deciding and pre-professional students. In 2014, she co-chaired the Working Group on Alcohol and Sexual Assault Prevention Education. Prior to her term as Vice Provost and Dean, Cudd was the Associate Dean for Humanities, where she developed the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, and oversaw the development of online and hybrid courses in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
A distinguished scholar and teacher, Cudd focuses in her research on themes of oppression, economic inequality, and gender. Her award-winning 2006 book, Analyzing Oppression (Oxford University Press), examines the economic, social and psychological causes and effects of oppression. Her recent work concerns the moral value of capitalism, conceptions of domestic violence in international law, and the injustice of educational inequality.
Cudd has taught a wide variety of courses in philosophy and gender studies. Her teaching incorporates innovative hybrid and experiential elements that challenge students to learn more deeply and think more critically. In 2001 she was awarded the William T. Kemper Teaching Fellowship, KU’s highest teaching award, and in 2005 the Mortar Board Outstanding Educator Award.
She received her BA in Mathematics and Philosophy at Swarthmore College in 1982, and an MA in Philosophy in 1984, an MA in Economics in 1986, and the PhD in Philosophy in 1988 all from the University of Pittsburgh.
An avid runner (having qualified for and run the 2005 Boston Marathon) and hiker, she also enjoys skiing and traveling. She is married to Neal Becker and they have three sons.
Kenneth Lutchen, Dean of the College of Engineering & Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Dr. Kenneth R. Lutchen, is Dean of the College of Engineering and Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. He received his B.S. in Engineering Science from the University of Virginia and the M.S. and Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University. Dr. Lutchen is one of the world’s leading biomedical engineers. He has published over 125 peer-reviewed journal articles and patented several new methods to perform mechanical ventilation.
Dean Lutchen was Chair of Biomedical Engineering from 1998-2006. During that time the department received a $14 million dollar Leadership Award from the Whitaker Foundation and a $5 Million Translational Research Partnership Award from the Coulter Foundation. Boston University is the only institution in the nation to have received both awards. He also conceived and attracted an NIH Ph.D. Student Training Grant in Quantitative Biology and Physiology. During his Chairmanship in BME, the Department’s ranking in US News and World Report improved from 18th to 6th. Dr. Lutchen has been the recipient of the College of Engineering’s Professor of the Year Award and the Biomedical Engineering Professor of the Year Award — twice.
Dr. Lutchen is currently the President of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE). He has been on the Board of Directors for the Biomedical Engineering Society, served on scientific advisory boards for the Whitaker Foundation, and for several bioengineering departments and colleges of engineering nationwide, and is a member of study sections at the National Institute of Health.
As Dean, Dr. Lutchen has orchestrated the creation of a new Division of Materials Science and Engineering, a new Division of Systems Engineering within the College of Engineering. He has also created new Concentration programs in Energy and Environmental Engineering and Nanotechnology. Since becoming Dean, undergraduate freshman enrollment has increased by 50% and Graduate funding per faculty has increased to 18th in the nation and the College’s Graduate Ranking in US News and World Report has improved from 52nd to 39th in the Nation.
Eswar Priyadarshan, GRS '87, CAS '87, CEO, Tasteful Inc., Board Member, Possible Health, Chief Bot, BotCentral
Eswar Priyadarshan is the CEO and Co-founder of Tasteful, Inc. as well as the Chief Bot at Bot Central. He is formerly a Senior Director at Apple, CTO and Co-founder of Quattro Wireless, and CTO and CO-founder of M-Qube. Prior to his entrepreneurial streak, Eswar was a senior member of the team at Adobe that transformed Acrobat and Adobe PDF from a desktop-LAN based product into a browser-integrated product that could deliver rich documents over the internet.
Though Priyadarshan has a lengthy tech résumé and received the BU Computer Science Distinguished Alumni Award in 2016—his role at Tasteful is that of a visionary. He thinks about the kind of people who might want to use the app—like Paleo diners on a business trip or gluten-free eaters looking for restaurants their friends can also enjoy—and guides the company to meet those needs.
Eswar’s family has three generations of connections to Boston University. He holds a B.A./M.A. in computer science from Boston University. His parents were on the faculty and his son is currently enrolled in the School of Education.
Photo by Mitch Tobias
Ioannis Paschalidis, Professor & Director of the Center for Information & Systems Engineering
Yannis Paschalidis is a Professor and Distinguished Faculty Fellow of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Systems Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering at Boston University. He is the Director of the Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE). He obtained his Ph.D. (1996) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been at Boston University since 1996. His current research interests lie in the fields of systems and control, networks, applied probability, optimization, operations research, computational biology, medical informatics, and bioinformatics.
Prof. Paschalidis' work has been recognized with an NSF CAREER award and the second prize in the George E. Nicholson paper competition by INFORMS. Joint work with students has been recognized with the best student paper award at WiOpt (a wireless networks conference), an IBM/IEEE Smarter planet award, an IEEE Crowdsourcing prize (for work in medical informatics), and a finalist best student paper award in ICRA (a robotics conference). His work on protein docking (with his collaborators) has been recognized for best performance in modeling protein-protein complexes. He was an invited participant at the 2002 Frontiers of Engineering Symposium organized by the National Academy of Engineering, and at the 2014 National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAFKI) Conference. Prof. Paschalidis is a Fellow of the IEEE and the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems.
Stan Sclaroff, Associate Dean of Mathematical and Computational Sciences
Stan Sclaroff joined the BU Department of Computer Science in 1995 after completing his PhD at MIT. He founded the Image and Video Computing research group at Boston University in 1995. He served as the Chair of the Department from 2007-2013. Stan’s research interests are in computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning.
Stan is an expert in the areas of tracking, video-based analysis of human motion and gesture, deformable shape matching and recognition, as well as image/video database indexing, retrieval, and data mining methods. He developed one of the first content-based image retrieval systems for the Internet, the ImageRover, years before Google Image Search appeared. His more recent work has focused on human tracking algorithms, analysis and identification of hand motion related to sign language, and filtering methods for multimedia retrieval.
George Savage (ENG '81), M.D., Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer of Proteus Digital Health
George Savage is chief medical officer and co-founder of Proteus Digital Health, and formerly the company’s vice president of research and development. He sees Digital Medicine as an invaluable collaboration platform for patient and physician, integrating information about a patient’s response to therapy directly into everyday healthcare.
George is focused on developing the clinical and economic evidence needed to secure global regulatory approvals and spur widespread adoption of Proteus’s ingestible sensor platform. He serves on the board of the California Life Sciences Association, the Boston University College of Engineering advisory council, and in 2016 was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
George holds a B.S. in biomedical engineering from Boston University, an M.D. from Tufts University School of Medicine, and an M.B.A. from Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He completed postgraduate training in surgery at the University of Massachusetts and is licensed to practice medicine in California. George has a successful 27-year track record of starting and developing technology-based healthcare companies in Silicon Valley.
*Panelists are subject to change.