10th Anniversary Celebration

Nomi Bergman '85 is a senior executive at Advance focused on corporate development and strategic partnerships. Bergman has over 25 years of experience as an operator, investor and advisor to technology companies, where she has focused on mobile, data and video communications, space technology, information technology and data services, advanced advertising, and emerging technologies centered on reimagining and improving the customer experience.

Previously, President of Bright House Networks, Bergman was one of the company’s founders who led it to become the sixth-largest cable operator in the United States, with 8,500 employees, 2.5 million customers, and over $4B in annual revenue.

Bergman is an experienced board member who previously served as director of Comcast Corporation in addition to her current roles as a director of publicly-held Visteon Corporation and privately-held 1010data, HawkEye360 and Black & Veatch. Bergman is also a trustee of her alma mater, the University of Rochester, Adaptive Spirit, the Cable Center and One Revolution. She is also a longstanding member of the FCC Technological Advisory Council (TAC).

Mujdat Cetin is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Robin and Tim Wentworth Director of the Goergen Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at University of Rochester. He is also serving as the Director of the New York State Center of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. Previously he served as a faculty member at Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey, and as a Research Scientist at MIT. He also held visiting faculty positions at MIT, Northeastern University, and Boston University.

Mujdat Cetin received his BS in electrical engineering from Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey in 1993, a MS in electrical engineering from the University of Salford, Manchester UK in 1995, followed by a PhD in electrical engineering from Boston University, Boston, MA in 2001.

Professor Cetin received several awards including the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award; the EURASIP/Elsevier Signal Processing Best Paper Award; the IET Radar, Sonar and Navigation Premium Award; and the Turkish Academy of Sciences Distinguished Young Scientist Award.

Caitlin Dreisbach, PhD, RN, is an assistant professor at the University of Rochester School of Nursing with an affiliation in the Goergen Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. She is currently a practicing nurse at Strong Memorial Hospital on the high-risk obstetrics unit (3-1200).

Dr. Dreisbach's research focus is on the use of quantitative methods to make better clinical assessments during pregnancy. Further, she is interested in the health of women over the course of their lifetime. This includes how conditions during the periconceptual and pregnancy periods impact short and long-term health.

Professor Downey joined the University of Rochester as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Data Science after completing a PhD in Computational Linguistics at the University of Washington. Professor Downey’s research focuses on developing methods to improve Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for under-resourced languages – languages that lack the data abundance needed to train modern machine learning models.

Anson Kahng joined University of Rochester as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science in July 2022. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. Broadly, Anson's research interests lie at the intersection of theoretical computer science, artificial intelligence, and economics. More specifically, he is interested in the relationship between computer science and democracy, and he uses tools from computational social choice to analyze new democratic paradigms such as liquid democracy, participatory budgeting, and virtual democracy from the perspective of various desiderata including strategyproofness, robustness, and fairness, among others.

Danny Sabbah '74, '78 MS, '82 PhD is currently retired from IBM. He has over 40 years experience as a software professional with experience in software management, research and software development. His last assignment was to shepherd the evolution of IBM’s Cloud business as it’s CTO and chief product strategist. He and his team created the PaaS solution that IBM currently sells (Bluemix) on it’s core IaaS offering. Prior to his CTO role, he was General Manager for two of IBM’s multibillion dollar software businesses. He was a founder of IBM’s open source policy and had a leading hand in such projects as Eclipse, Web Services, and CloudFoudry. As a researcher in IBM's Research division in the late 80’s and early 90’s, he did work in AI and was the first ever Director of Software Technology there. His own research work was in the early days of so called “connectionism”, a precursor to today’s deep learning. He has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Rochester and a business degree from the Wharton School of management at U of Penn.