Jasiri X: “Racism: The Secret of My Success”
Jasiri X is the first independent hip-hop artist to be awarded an Honorary Doctorate, which he received from Chicago Theological Seminary in 2016. This recognition grew out of the spiritual/political urgency and artistic vision he shared on songs like “Justice For Trayvon” and “Strange Fruit”, which documented the unjust police killings of young Blacks in the Millennial Generation. Likewise, he has been deeply involved with the national Movement for Black Lives, working with organizations like The Gathering for Justice, Blackout for Human Rights, BYP100 and Sankofa. Still, he remains rooted in the Pittsburgh based organization he founded, 1Hood Media, which teaches youth of color how to analyze and create media for themselves. He has performed his music from the Smithsonian to the Apollo Theater and has discussed his views on hip-hop, race, and politics at leading institutions across the nation, including Harvard University, the University of Chicago, Yale, and Stanford, among others. One of the most important political voices of his generation, in 2017 he received the Nathan Cummings Foundation Fellowship to start the 1Hood Artivist Academy. Jasiri is also a recipient of the USA Cummings Fellowship in Music, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist Fellowship.
Konstantinos Pelechrinis: “Pitt Smart Living: Rethinking Smart Cities”
Konstantinos (Kostas) Pelechrinis is an associate professor at the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh where he heads the Network and Data Science Lab. He received his PhD from the Computer Science Department at the University of California at Riverside (UCR), while prior to that he received his undergraduate diploma from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. His research is focused on network science, data mining and applied machine learning, with an emphasis on applications in urban science and sports analytics. His research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office (2015 Young Investigator Award recipient), while it has also been featured in popular media outlets.
Andrew Schwartz: “A Brain Interface for Paralysis”
Dr. Schwartz received his Ph.D. in Physiology from the University of Minnesota in 1984. He then went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where he worked with Dr. Apostolos Georgopoulos, who was developing the concept of directional tuning and population-based movement representation in the motor cortex.
In 1988, Dr. Schwartz began his independent research career at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. That work showed how a high fidelity representation of movement intention could be extracted from the motor cortex. Schwartz teamed up with colleagues at Arizona State University to develop cortical neural prosthetics before moving to the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego in 1995 and then to the University of Pittsburgh in 2002.
After demonstrating that monkeys could use this technique to control arm prostheses in a self-feeding task, orient a prosthetic hand, and control the fingers when grasping, this approach was demonstrated in two paralyzed subjects who operated a high-performance prosthetic arm and hand. Tactile feedback sensed by the prosthetic hand is being fed back to stimulating electrodes to impart sensation as part of our ongoing work to extend this technology to manipulation and dexterous behavior.
Satvika Neti: “Embracing the Hyphen”
Satvika Neti works at the Women and Girls Foundation as a Digital Social Justice Advocate, working to bridge the gap between tech and social impact. She graduated in May 2016 from Carnegie Mellon University with a BS in International Relations and a minor in Computer Science, and in May 2017 from the Coro Fellowship in Public Affairs.
She has co-founded multiple programs and initiatives, including Rangoli Pittsburgh, Beyond the Binary, Moneythink CMU, and worked at the ACLU of Pittsburgh as well as many organizations in Washington, DC, such as the Center for American Progress and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
She also serves on Mayor Peduto’s recently established LGBTQIA+ Advisory Council. Her favorite color is lime green, she has a lot of feelings about the constitution, and can usually be found in line for Chipotle.
Dan Lockton: “Design and The Importance of Imaginaries”
Dan Lockton is Chair of Design Studies at Carnegie Mellon School of Design, and leads the Imaginaries Lab, a new research/teaching platform. His research centers on questions of how the design of the systems around us interacts with our understanding of the world, and how to develop new ways to understand, and ultimately new ways to live, as part of a transition to more sustainable societies, socially and ecologically. Current research topics include developing design tools to work with new metaphors, qualitative and analog interface design, investigating mental models of local government, and ambient sonification of energy data. Dan joined CMU in 2016 from the Royal College of Art, London, where he worked from 2013–16, as a researcher and tutor at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design and the Innovation Design Engineering program. Dan’s earlier research, including his PhD at Brunel University London, focused on exploring design for behavior change, applied through roles in sustainability-related research projects including a collaboration with the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change, and SusLabNWE, a European Living Lab project. Dan has an MPhil in Technology Policy from the University of Cambridge, and a BSc in Industrial Design Engineering from Brunel.