Founder, Digi.City

PhD Candidate, School of Information

Chelsea McCullough (Collier) is a PhD student in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research centers on urban co-creation and socio-technical systems. She is a graduate research assistant (GRA) for the Smart Hand Tool Project for Good Systems (an interdisciplinary core research program) with a research focus on ethical AI and skilled trade workers. She is also an NSF Research Traineeship Fellow in Ethical AI. Chelsea returns to UT Austin following a career in the private sector which includes founding Digi.City, a forum for social impact and smart(er) cities and serving as the Editor-At-Large for Smart Cities Connect. She is a University of Manchester (UK) Fellow (2019), a Marshall Memorial Fellow (2018) and an Eisenhower Fellow (2016). Her previous experience in government, economic development, social enterprise and tech entrepreneurship informs her cross-sector approach. Her graduate and undergraduate degrees are from the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin.

Chief Innovation Officer

City of Austin

Daniel Culotta is the City of Austin's Chief Innovation Officer. The Innovation Office focuses on research, design, data, partnerships, and collaborative consultative services that help the City create new solutions for complex challenges such as homelessness, displacement, emerging technologies, and green workforce development. Daniel leads the talented Innovation team in taking an equitable, human-centered approach to civic innovation, and drives an organization-wide innovation culture that improves outcomes for all Austinites.

Prior to joining the City of Austin, Daniel created the first comprehensive sustainability and environmental program for the City of Avondale, AZ, and co-founded a startup that helped design and speed adoption of innovative sustainable products and services. Daniel graduated from the University of Texas with a Bachelors in Anthropology and Business Administration, and worked in environmental consulting before earning a Masters in Sustainability Science from Arizona State University.

Associate Professor and

Director of UT's Urban Information Lab

School of Architecture

Junfeng Jiao is an Associate Professor in the Community and Regional Planning Program at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the founding director of Urban Information Lab, director of Texas Smart Cities, director of UT Ethical AI program, and a founding member of UT Austin's Good Systems Grand Challenge.

His research focuses on Smart Cities, Urban Informatics, and Ethical/Generative AI. He uses different information technologies to quantify urban infrastructures and their influences on people’s behaviors. He first coined the term "transit deserts" and measured it in all U.S. cities. Using different machine learning methods, Dr. Jiao investigated and quantified the spatial-temporal patterns of various shared mobility activities (Uber, Scooter, and Bike Sharing) in major U.S. cities. Currently, he is leading three smart city projects: NSF: CIVIC Challenge Community Hub for Smart Mobility (Smart Hub); NSF NRT: AI-Convergent, Responsible, Ethical, Applied Training Experience for Roboticists (Ethical AI); and A Good System for Smart City. He is also a Co-PI for USDOT funded the Center for Climate-Smart Transportation at the Johns Hopkins University and a Co-PI for USHUD funded The Equitable Technologies for Housing Innovation Center at UT Austin. 

Teaming with colleagues at the University of Houston, Dr. Jiao has expanded his Smart City research to the Houston area. As a Co-PI, he received NSF funding to combat the Food Deserts problems with AI technology. The project title is "NSF Convergence Accelerator Track J: Artificial-Intelligence-Based Decision Support for Equitable Food and Nutrition Security in the Houston Area."

Dr. Jiao has published over 110 peer-reviewed articles and two books on Shared Mobility and Smart Cities, respectively. His research has been reported on in major media outlets such as ABC, Associated Press, CNN, Fox, NBC, NPR, New York Times, SXSW, and Wired. As a PI or Co-PI, Dr. Jiao has raised over $25 million in funding from different sources such as NSF, USDOT, USHUD, UT, Microsoft, MITRE, Google, and others.

Professor and Co-Director of CosmicAI

School of Information

Dr. Matthew Lease's research integrates artificial intelligence (AI) and human-computer interaction (HCI) techniques across the fields of crowdsourcing and human computation (HCOMP), information retrieval (IR), and natural language processing (NLP). Lease is a faculty founder and leader of UT Austin's Good Systems, an eight-year, university-wide "moonshot" Grand Challenge to design responsible AI technologies. As part of Good Systems, Lease is leading a six-year, seven-member faculty project developing explainable AI techniques to curb disinformation. Lease is also co-director of the new NSF-Simons AI Institute for Cosmic Origins, CosmicAI.

Lease is the recipient of three Early Career awards: from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS). Recent research awards include Best Student Paper at the 2022 The Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST), Best Student Paper at the 2019 European Conference for Information Retrieval (ECIR), and Best Paper at the 2016 AAAI Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP) conference. Lease received degrees in Computer Science from Brown University (PhD, MSc) and the University of Washington (BSc).

Professor, Aerospace Engineering and 

Engineering Mechanics

Cockrell School of Engineering

MODERATOR

Dr. Luis Sentis is a Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a General Dynamics Endowed Faculty Fellow, and Chair of UT Austin's Good Systems.

In Austin, he leads the Human Centered Robotics Laboratory, a laboratory focusing on control, task and motion planning, human factors, and experimentation with humanoid robots, mobile manipulation robots, exoskeletons and autonomous systems. He is also a founding member of the UT Robotics Portfolio Program and the UT Ethics of AI Portfolio Program. He was the UT Austin Lead for DARPA's Robotics Challenge with NASA Johnson Space Center where he helped to design and test the Valkyrie humanoid robot. His research has been funded by ONR, NASA, NSF, ARL, AFC, DARPA and private companies. He has been awarded the NASA Elite Team Award for his contributions to NASA’s Johnson Space Center Software Robotics and Simulation Division.

Sentis is also a founding member and innovation advisor for Apptronik Systems, a company focusing on human-centered robotic products.

Sentis received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. He was a La Caixa Foundation Fellow while at Stanford. He holds a B.S. degree in Telecommunications and Electronics Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Before Stanford, he worked in Silicon Valley as a Control Systems Engineer for clean room automation.