The Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech (ML@GT) continues to diversify and expand its leadership team. Starting in September the leadership team will add Cassie Mitchell and Deven Desai as associate directors.

Mitchell, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering will take on the role of associate director of Outreach and Diversity. She will focus on partnering the center with existing diversity organizations at Georgia Tech and local youth to pique interest in pursuing an education and career in machine learning.

“Machine learning, itself, leverages a variety of fields — engineering, computer science, and mathematics, to name just a few — to produce tools that impact lives every day.  It's only appropriate that ML@GT continues to foster an environment that grows diversity to strengthen the creativity in problem-solving that diverse backgrounds naturally bring,” said Mitchell. “I’m excited to make machine learning more approachable and to inspire the next generation of machine learning creators and users.”

Desai, an associate professor in the Scheller College of Business, will be the center’s first associate director for Legal, Policy, Ethics, and Machine Learning. Not a technologist by training, Desai will draw from his experience working at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy and Google as Academic Research Counsel to help policy makers, legal scholars and technologists work better together. This includes helping each party understand how a given technology works and what issues it might raise.

“I am excited to be part of ML@GT because of the opportunity to be part of a world class group of thinkers and to connect our work to the world.  I believe there is a need to bridge the worlds of technology and law, policy, and ethics,” said Desai. “ML@GT is poised to increase not only machine learning insights and breakthroughs but also the way in which machine learning is built and used to serve society. I am honored and thrilled to be part of building that future.”

Mitchell and Desai will join existing leadership members Irfan Essa, Justin Romberg, Zsolt Kira, and Le Song.

About the Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech

The Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech is an interdisciplinary research center bringing together more than 190 faculty members and 60 machine learning Ph.D. students from across the institute for meaningful collaboration and innovation in machine learning and artificial intelligence. Students and faculty are experts in areas including, but not limited to computer vision, natural language processing, robotics, deep learning, ethics and fairness, computational finance, information security, and logistics and manufacturing. For more information, visit www.ml.gatech.edu