CRAFT Leadership and Faculty

Dr. Steve Yang holds a Ph.D. in Systems and Information Engineering from University of Virginia with concentration on Financial Engineering. His research has been focused on understanding markets’ irrationality and its impact on trading, portfolio, risk management, and systemic risk using decision science tools such as Markov decision processes, reinforcement learning, and other artificial intelligence (AI) methods.

Mohammed J. Zaki is a Professor and Department Head of Computer Science at RPI. He received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University of Rochester in 1998. His research interests focus novel data mining and machine learning techniques, particularly for learning from graph structured and textual data, with applications in bioinformatics, personal health and financial analytics. He has around 300 publications (and six patents), including the Data Mining and Machine Learning textbook (2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2020). He has served as program chair for most of the major conferences in data mining and knowledge management, such as SDM, SIGKDD, CIKM and ICDM. He is currently serving on the Board of Directors for ACM SIGKDD -- the special interest group on knowledge discovery and data science. He was a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Department of Energy Early Career Principal Investigator Award. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of the AAAS.

Dr. Calhoun has spent 25 years in the high-tech segment of the wireless communications industry. He is a co-founder of InterDigital Communications Corporation (NASDAQ: IDCC), where he was involved in the pioneering development of digital cellular technology, including the first systems based on TDMA technology (the architecture underlying approximately 80% of today's cellular networks). He writes frequently for Forbes.