We are pleased to share with you the new set of WITHITS leaders! Christina and I have had a great time as WITHITS co-chairs for the past three years and are pleased to welcome

• Hye Won Chung (Kaist)
• Sanghamitra Dutta (University of Maryland, College Park)
• Lalitha Vadlamani (IIIT Hyderabad)
• Rashmi Vinayak (CMU)

as the new co-chairs representing four different institutions across three countries! Hye Won and Lalitha will be leading the event at ISIT 2022, and we look forward to seeing you all there. Read more about our new chairs and some fun facts/personal messages from them :)!

• Hye Won Chung (Kaist)

Hye Won Chung is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering at KAIST. She completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT in 2014. From 2014 to 2017, she worked at University of Michigan as a research fellow. She received her M.S. from MIT, and B.S. (with summa cum laude) from KAIST, all in the Department of EECS. Her research interests include data science, information theory, statistical inference, machine learning, and quantum information.

Message: I am very excited to join WITHITS team. I look forward to meeting and interacting with our community members more closely through this role, and I hope that WITHITS events in diverse conferences will provide great opportunities for ITSOC members to connect with peers and potential mentors.

• Sanghamitra Dutta (University of Maryland, College Park)

Sanghamitra Dutta is a research scientist at JP Morgan Chase AI Research in the Explainable AI team. She is an incoming faculty at the University of Maryland, College Park (starting from Fall 2022).  She received her Ph.D. and Masters's from Carnegie Mellon University and B. Tech. (honors) from IIT Kharagpur, all in Electrical and Computer Engineering. 

Her research interests broadly revolve around machine learning, information theory, and optimization. She is particularly interested in addressing the issues in machine learning concerning fairness, explainability, and law, by bringing in a novel foundational perspective deep-rooted in information theory, and causality. In her prior work, she has also examined problems in reliable computing, proposing novel algorithmic solutions for large-scale distributed machine learning in the presence of faults and failures, using tools from coding theory (an emerging area called “coded computing”). She is a recipient of the 2021 AG Milnes Dissertation Award from CMU, 2020 Cylab Presidential Fellowship, 2019 K&L Gates Presidential Fellowship, 2019 Axel Berny Presidential Graduate Fellowship, 2017 Tan Endowed Graduate Fellowship, 2016 Prabhu and Poonam Goel Graduate Fellowship, 2015 Best Undergraduate Project Award at IIT Kharagpur, and the 2014 HONDA Young Engineer and Scientist Award. She has also pursued research internships at IBM Research and Dataminr.

Fun Fact: She enjoys playing board games (mostly in person but had to resort to Board Games Arena since the pandemic). She is always up for a round of Catan or Hanabi.

• Lalitha Vadlamani (IIIT Hyderabad)

Lalitha Vadlamani received her B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Osmania University, Hyderabad, in 2003 and her M.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, in 2005 and 2015 respectively. From May 2015, she is working as Assistant professor in IIIT Hyderabad, where she is affiliated to Signal Processing and Communications Research Center. From 2006 to 2008, she worked as an engineer at Qualcomm, Hyderabad (2006) and design engineer at Conexant Systems, Noida (2006-2008). Prior to joining IIIT Hyderabad, she worked as a research intern at Microsoft Research, Bangalore. Her research interests include coding for distributed storage and computing, index coding, polar codes, learning-based codes and coded blockchains. She is a recipient of Prof. I.S.N. Murthy medal from IISc, 2005 and the TCS Research Scholarship for the year 2011.

(Not so fun fact:) I came to know about Claude Shannon first in 2001, when my professor in undergraduate college read his obituary. Didn't know I will be involved with IT Society going forward.

• Rashmi Vinayak (CMU)

Rashmi Vinayak is an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at Carnegie Mellon University. Rashmi is a recipient of VMware Systems Research Award 2021, NSF CAREER Award 2020-25, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Memorial Lecture Award 2020, Facebook Distributed Systems Research Award 2019, Google Faculty Research Award 2018, and Facebook Communications and Networking Research Award 2017. Her PhD thesis was awarded the UC Berkeley Eli Jury Dissertation Award 2016, and her work has received USENIX NSDI 2021 Community (Best Paper) Award, and IEEE Data Storage Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards for the years 2011/2012. Rashmi received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2016 where she worked on resource-efficient fault tolerance for big-data systems, and was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley's AMPLab/RISELab from 2016-17. During her Ph.D. studies, Rashmi was a recipient of Facebook Fellowship 2012-13, the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship 2013-15, and the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship 2015-16. 

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rvinayak/

Yours, 

Christina and Gireeja