Data Democracy

Feras A. Batarseh is an Associate Professor with the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech (VT) and the Director of A3 (AI Assurance and Applications) Lab. His research spans the areas of AI Assurance, Cyberbiosecurity, AI for Agriculture and Water, and Data-Driven Public Policy. His work has been published at various prestigious journals and international conferences. Additionally, Dr. Batarseh published multiple chapters and books, his two recent books are: "Federal Data Science", and "Data Democracy", both by Elsevier's Academic Press.Dr. Batarseh is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Agricultural and Applied Economical Association (AAEA), and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). He has taught AI and Data Science courses at multiple universities including George Mason University (GMU), University of Maryland - Baltimore County (UMBC), Georgetown University, and George Washington University (GWU).Dr. Batarseh obtained his Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Central Florida (UCF) (2007, 2011), a Juris Masters of Law from GMU (2022), and a Graduate Certificate in Project Leadership from Cornell University (2016). He currently holds courtesy appointments with the Center for Advanced Innovation in Agriculture (CAIA), National Security Institute (NSI), and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at VT.Ruixin Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and GeoInformation Sciences (GGS) - College of Science at George Mason University (GMU), Fairfax, VA. He received his PhD in Aerospace Engineering from University of Southern California (USC) in 1990. His research work ranged from Fluid Dynamics to Astrophysics and General Relativity to Data Science, Information Systems, Data Mining, and Earth Systems Science. Dr. Yang led a software development team that built several prototypes for earth science information systems. His recent research is focused on data mining methods for hurricane-related earth science. He has published several referred papers on earth science data search, online analysis, metadata management, content-based search, and big data analytics.