Kristin Bennett, PhD
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York, USA

Kristin P. Bennett is the Associate Director of the Institute for Data Exploration and Application and a Professor in the Mathematical Sciences and Computer Science Departments at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research focuses on extracting information from data using novel machine learning and data visualizations, and the applications of these methods to support decision making and to accelerate discovery in science, engineering, public health and business. As a member of the machine learning, data mining, and operations research communities, she has served as a study section member for the NIH National Library of Medicine and as associate or guest editors for ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Naval Research Logistics, Machine Learning Journal, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks, and Journal on Machine Learning Research. She served as program chair of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. She has led many data-driven health-related projects based on machine learning and data mining. These include the award winning “MortaltyMinder” app for understanding the social determinants of mortality, the NIH-sponsored “TB-Insight” project which uses bioinformatics to track and control tuberculosis, analyses of high needs patients for regional healthcare providers, and AI methods for generating synthetic health data to preserve patient privacy. She also led projects on sensor-based anomaly detection for manufacturing. She founded and directs the Data Interdisciplinary Challenges Intelligent Technology Exploration Laboratory (Data INCITE Lab.) which is pioneering highly effective new approaches for data analytics in undergraduate education with sponsorship from NIH, United Health Foundation, and industrial partners. In the Data INCITE Lab, undergraduate and graduate students tackle open applied data analytics problems contributed by industry, foundations, and researchers.