2024 Gen AI Speakers
Dr. Jianwei Niu
Generation AI Lead, Interim Dean, University College
Director, School of Data Science | Professor, Computer Science
Dr. Jianwei Niu is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Associate Dean of University College at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UT San Antonio). Dr. Niu received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Waterloo in 2005 and immediately after started the tenure-track assistant professor position at UT San Antonio in 2005. Her teaching was recognized at UT San Antonio by the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award and the President’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching Excellence.
Dr. Niu has supervised 11 Ph.D. students and nine of them completed their Ph.D. degrees with seven landing their academic positions at Stony Brook University, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), St. Mary's University, Air Force Institute of Technology, and UT San Antonio respectively. Her research has been funded by highly competitive grants from the DoD, NSA, NSF, US Army, Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), Microsoft Inc., MITRE Corp, etc. Her research establishment has gained national and international recognition, evident by more than 60 peer-reviewed publications in highly selective venues, including flagship journals and conferences.
Dr. Michael Balazs
Autonomy Futurist & Director, Early Career Programs for MITRE National Security
Dr. Michael A. Balazs serves as an Autonomy Futurist and Director of Early Career Programs for MITRE’s National Security Sector. He is responsible for furthering autonomy’s impact on the mission by advancing autonomous technology, adoption, and trust within the services and combatant commands. He identifies and executes opportunities uniquely suited to MITRE’s role and strengths as a federally funded research and development center. These opportunities result in the consummation of both high-risk big bets, and subtle pressure points that drive mission impact. In his role as Director of Early Career Programs for MITRE’s National Security Sector, he oversees the recruiting, onboarding, and retention of a combined 250 interns, new grads, and those with less than 7 years of post-bachelor’s experience annually.
Ron Hodge
National Security Strategist and Gen AI Program Manager, MITRE
Ron is a national security strategist providing strategic and technical leadership across multiple disciplines. Focused on early identification of disruptive technologies and acting on opportunities to conceptualize and deploy new ideas to address the hardest challenges facing our nation.
Dr. Eric Bloedorn
Chief Scientist for National Security AI, MITRE
Dr. Bloedorn is currently a principal scientist in the Intelligent Information Management and Exploitation Technology Area. He has worked on a number of areas in applying machine learning/data mining methods including intrusion detection, aviation safety, fraud detection and text summarization.
Steffani Silva
Data Scientist and Gen AI Lesson Designer, MITRE
Steffani is a Senior Data scientist in the Systems Engineering Technical Center at MITRE. Her current work is focused on natural language processing and trustworthy AI with a focus on graph neural networks. She is a lead technical advisor for GenAI lesson development and has served multiple government agencies as an advisor for data science upskilling.
Dr. Rebecca Schroeder
Assistant Dean, University College
Rebecca Schroeder is an associate professor of instruction in the University College’s Academic Inquiry and Scholarship program and core faculty for the School of Data Science. With a specialty in curriculum development that emphasizes experiential learning, Dr. Schroeder serves as associate dean of curriculum and programs for University College. In her role, she supports the development of new transdisciplinary degree programs that are responsive to the marketplace. Finally, Dr. Schroeder serves as a faculty lead for the MITRE GenAI Consortium, to introduce artificial intelligence principles to students in all academic disciplines and expand educational research in the field of data science.
Dr. Ashwin Malshe
Associate Professor, Marking, Alvarez College of Business
Dr. Ashwin Malshe is an associate professor of marketing at the Alvarez College of Business at The University of Texas at San Antonio. He joined the UT San Antonio in 2016 after serving as an assistant professor at ESSEC Business School, Paris-Singapore. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Mannheim in Germany since 2013, teaching in the undergraduate program and EMBA program at the Mannheim Business School.
Dr. Malshe has research interests in marketing-finance interface, social media marketing, and machine learning applications. In particular, his research focuses on measuring the impact of marketing strategy in the financial markets. Dr. Malshe has teaching interests in social media marketing, marketing analytics and data visualization. He was the Graduate Advisor of Record (equivalent to Academic Director) of the Masters of Science in Data Analytics program (MSDA) at the College of Business for four years. He is also a core faculty on the UT San Antonio-MITRE GenAI Program.
Dr. Malshe has published in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Academy for Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Journal of Business Research among others. He is the Chief Communications Officer of Marketing Letters and a member of the Editorial review boards (ERB) of Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Retailing, Marketing Letters, and Journal of Business Research (Retail section). He is an ad hoc reviewer for the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Academy for Marketing Science, and International Journal of Research in Marketing.
Dr. Sue Hum
Professor, English, College of Liberal and Fine Arts
Sue Hum's research and teaching interests include critical race studies, visual rhetoric, and quantitative literacy in professional writing contexts. Her publications include Persuading with Numbers (Kona, 2017) and two edited collections, Ways of Seeing, Ways of Speaking (with Kristie Fleckenstein and Linda Calendrillo, Parlor Press, 2007) and Relations, Locations, Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers (with Peter Vandenberg and Jennifer Clary-Lemon, National Council of Teachers of English Press, 2006). She has previously served as Undergraduate Advisor of Record for the Department of English. She has also served as Assistant Dean of Assessment for the Quality Enhancement Plan in the College of Liberal and Fine Arts.
Dr. Ian Thacker
Assistant Professor, Educational Psychology, College of Eduction and Human Development
Ian Thacker is an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His research examines teaching, learning, and teacher education in STEM. Specifically, he pursues three strands of research focused on: (1) mathematical skills that can be leveraged to support conceptual change about scientific topics, (2) the use of innovative technology for STEM teaching and learning, and (3) teacher beliefs and biases that contribute to gender- and race-based achievement gaps in STEM.
Ian earned B.A. degrees in Mathematics and Physics, a M.A. in Mathematics and Science Education, a M.S. in Statistics, and earned his Ph.D. in Urban Education Policy with a concentration in Educational Psychology from the University of Southern California. Prior to earning his Ph.D., Ian spent ten years teaching mathematics and physics to culturally and linguistically diverse students in Colorado and California. He has published several articles in peer-reviewed journals, including first-authored publications in the Journal of Educational Psychology and Research in Mathematics Education.
Dr. Jason Duncan
Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy Innovation Center MITRE
Siobhán Fleming, PhD
Interim Assistant Vice President, Faculty Research Development
Siobhán Fleming has worked at the University of Texas at San Antonio since November 2019. A dual citizen with the United States and Canada, she received her PhD in Higher Education Research, Policy and Management from the University of Oregon. She has worked at both four-year and two-year colleges in the United States and in Ireland as a visiting professor at the University College Dublin. Prior to UT San Antonio, Siobhan was the Associate Vice Chancellor of Research & Institutional Effectiveness at the Lone Star College System, a large community college system in Houston, Texas, and as Associate Vice President of Institutional Effectiveness at the University of St. Thomas-Houston.
At UT San Antonio, Siobhan manages the Research Interest Groups (RIGs) that consist of more than 200 faculty members from across all colleges in the university conducting transdisciplinary research on global grand challenges. She also supports the 29 UT San Antonio Centers and Institutes, in addition to her role as Sr. Director of Faculty Research Development. In that role, Siobhan works with Dr. Nicole Beebe, Assistant Vice President of REDKE, to advance research of all types by developing faculty researchers at all levels.
Nicole L. Beebe, Ph.D.
Melvin Lachman Endowed Chair, Professor and Chair, Information Systems & Cyber Security, Assistant Vice President, Faculty Research Development
Dr. Nicole L. Beebe previously served five years as the Director of The Cyber Center for Security and Analytics at UT San Antonio. Dr. Beebe’s research interests relate to cybersecurity, cyber analytics, digital forensics, and data analytics with applications to insider threat detection and analysis, IoT security and forensics, and cyber threat hunting. She has published approximately 50 peer-reviewed articles in top journals and conferences that have been cited over 1,700 times. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Homeland Security, various Department of Defense agencies, several industry partners, and has resulted in a patent-pending cyber search algorithm and multiple software platforms.
Dr. Beebe received her Ph.D. in Information Technology from UT San Antonio, an M.S. degree in Criminal Justice from Georgia State University, and a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Technological University.
