School of Computer Science

George is an Associate Research Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, with a courtesy appointment in the Computer Science Department, and co-director of the Parallel Data Lab. From 2021 to 2025, he also spent part of his time at Amazon Web Services as an Amazon Scholar. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto.

Yonatan Bisk is an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University – Language Technologies Institute and Robotics Institute (courtesy). He received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign working on unsupervised Bayesian models of linguistic syntax.

He runs the CLAW lab, Connecting Language to Action and the World. His group works on grounded and embodied language and communication, placing perception and interaction as central to how language is learned and understood. He has held appointments at USC's ISI (working on grounding), the University of Washington (for commonsense research), Microsoft Research (for vision+language), and Meta Inc (for Embodied AI).

Professor Carley specializes in network science, agent-based modeling, artificial intelligence and computational linguistics within a complex socio-technical system, organizational and social theory framework. In her work, she examines how cognitive, social and institutional factors come together to impact individual, organizational and societal outcomes. Using this lens she has addressed a number of policy issues including counter-terrorism, human and narcotic trafficking, social-cyber, cyber and nuclear threat, organizational resilience and design, natural disaster preparedness, cyber threat in social media, online harms, extremism, and leadership. She has written 4 books, edited 2 books, been on 10 NRC panels resulting in monographs, and published over 500 journal articles and chapters. She is the recipient of the lifetime achievement award in Mathematical Sociology, the Simmel award in Social Networks from the International Network for Social Network Analysis, and the Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence - “For the creation of empirical methods to rigorously establish the impact of human communication on software quality.” She is a member of the IEEE, ACM, ASA, the Academy of Management and INSNA. She has served as a task force member of the Defense Science Board and committee member on the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology. She is the developer of the popular ORA software for network analytics and visualization, and the NetMapper tool for text analytics that are widely used in academics, organizations and government.  Current technologies inclue AESOP for scenario design, and SynTel/X for synthetic telegram and X data. She is the chief scientist for the OMEN project a multi-institution project for creating a train as you learn environment and pedagogy for information operations. 

Lorrie Faith Cranor is the Director and Bosch Distinguished Professor in Security and Privacy Technologies of CyLab and the FORE Systems University Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. She directs the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-directs the MSIT-Privacy Engineering masters program. She was founding co-director of the Collaboratory Against Hate: Research and Action Center at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh. In 2016 she was on leave from CMU while serving as Chief Technologist at the US Federal Trade Commission, working in the office of Chairwoman Ramirez. She is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, Inc, a security awareness training company that was acquired by Proofpoint. She came to CMU in December 2003 after seven years at AT&T Labs-Research. While at AT&T she also taught in the Stern School of Business at New York University.

Dr. Cranor is a leading researcher in both online privacy and usable privacy and security, and has co-authored over 200 research papers in these areas. She has played a key role in building the usable privacy and security research community, having co-edited the seminal book Security and Usability (O'Reilly 2005), and founded the Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). She also cofounded the Conference on Privacy Engineering Practice and Respect (PEPR). She has testified about privacy issues at a Congressional hearing and at workshops held by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission. She chaired the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) Specification Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium and authored the book Web Privacy with P3P (O'Reilly 2002).

In 2003 Dr. Cranor was named one of the top 100 innovators 35 or younger by Technology Review magazine. In 2014 she was named an ACM Fellow for her contributions to usable privacy and security research and education, and in 2016 she was named an IEEE Fellow for her contributions to privacy engineering. In 2017 she was elected to the ACM CHI Academy. She is a recipient of the 2018 ACM CHI Social Impact Award and the 2018 IAPP Privacy Leadership Award. In 2020 she was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She received an Honorary Doctorate in Informatics from Università della Svizzera Italiana in 2022. She has also received an Alumni Achievement Award from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, the 2022 Carnegie Mellon Distinguished Professor of Engineering Award, and (with colleagues) the 2018 IEEE Cybersecurity Award for Practice and 2019 Carnegie Mellon University Allen Newell Award for Research Excellence. Dr. Cranor was appointed a Privacy by Design (PbD) Ambassador by the Privacy Commissioner of Ontario, Canada.

Dr. Cranor is frequently quoted in the press, and has appeared on the Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, CNN Financial News, NPR Morning Edition, NPR Science Friday, and NPR All Things Considered. Her TED talk on passwords has been viewed over 1.6 million times and was featured entertainment on Delta Airlines.

Dr. Cranor serves on a number of boards and working groups, including the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) Board of Directors, the Computing Research Association Board of Directors, the Aspen Institute Cybersecurity Group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) advisory board, and The Future of Privacy Forum Advisory Board. She is has been a member of the IAPP Certified Information Privacy Technolgist Exam Development Board and the IAPP Privacy Engineering Section Advisory Board. She previously served on the Electronic Frontier Foundation Board of Directors. She is also a commissioned Kentucky Colonel and a member of USACM. In 2000 she served on the Federal Trade Commission Advisory Committee on Online Access and Security. She has also served on the editorial boards of several journals.

Dr. Cranor has consulted for companies and non-profits on privacy policies, P3P, usable privacy and security, and technology policy. She has served as an expert witness in patent litigation, privacy cases, and in cases challenging the constitutionality of Internet harmful-to-minors laws, including the ACLU's successful challenge to the 1998 Children's Online Protection Act.

Dr. Cranor has been a vocal advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion. She has successfully advocated for expanded childcare options, lactation rooms, and family-friendly policies at Carnegie Mellon University, and played an active role on university committees on inclusion, diversity, and well-being. She is a mentor to a diverse set of students, postdocs, and junior faculty.

Dr. Cranor received her doctorate degree in Engineering & Policy from Washington University in St. Louis in 1996. She also holds an undergraduate degree and two masters degrees from Washington University. While in graduate school she helped found Crossroads, the ACM Student Magazine, and served as the publication's editor-in-chief for two years.

Dr. Cranor enjoys spending time with her husband, Chuck and her adult children Shane, Maya, and Nina. She plays the C flute and bass flute in local flute choirs and in her family band, Unanticipated Fun. She has served as a Pittsburgh Dynamo Youth Soccer board member, vice president, and age-level commissioner, and founded Dynamoms, an educational soccer program for women over 30 with little or no experience playing soccer. Since 2004 she has served as an Allegheny County, PA elections poll worker. She has also served as president of the Parent Teacher Organization at her kids' school.

Dr. Cranor practices yoga, is an avid photographer and quilter, and sews her own dresses with pockets. She spent the 2012-2013 academic year on sabbatical as a fellow in the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University where she worked on fiber arts projects that combined her interests in privacy and security, quilting, computers, and technology. She has won awards in local and national quilt competitions, and several of her quilts have been featured on the covers of books and journals. She had a solo exhibit of her quilts at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum and one of her quilts was featured in Science magazine. Two of her quilts as well as her "bad password" dress are now in the privacy art collection of the International Association of Privacy Professionals.

Dan DeBlasio is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology, a position he has been in since Fall of 2023. He is also the Director of the Integrated Masters in Computational Biology and Co-Assisitant Director of the MS in Computational Biology (MSCB) [with DJ Braiser]. In addition, he is the coordinator of Undergraduate Research for the Computational Biology Department. 

Dr. DeBlasio's course coordination focuses on algorithmic and computational foundations with applications in Computational Biology. Since arriving at CMU on the Teaching Track his courses offered are Algorithms and Advanced Data Structures, Essentials of Mathematics and Statistics, and Introduction to Computational Biology. He also leads the Professional Issues course for MSCB, MSAS, and the Integrated Masters in CB. His research focuses on similar areas to those in which his courses are offered, but additionally DeBlasio has worked on projects related to the use of Machine Learning to identify Unresolved Resident Space Objects from Hyperspectral Imagry. 

Before rejoining CMU in Fall of 2023, DeBlasio as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso from 2019, and before that was a Lane Fellow (postdoc) in his current department starting in 2016. He got his PhD at the University of Arizona, and his MS and BS from the University of Central Florida all in Computer Science. He has served on the ISCB (International Society for Computational Biology) Board of Directors (2017-2019) and maintains connections with the society in various roles. 

Fernando Diaz is an Associate Professor in the Language Technologies Institute (LTI) at Carnegie Mellon University and a research scientist at Google Research.  Fernando’s background is in the design and evaluation of search engines and recommender systems.  His current research covers three themes: quantitatively evaluating AI systems, retrieval-enhanced AI, and understanding the cultural impact of AI in domains like music and literature through interdisciplinary collaborations.  Having held both individual contributor and senior leadership positions in industry, Fernando is particularly interested in the deployment of real AI systems. Previously, Fernando was the assistant managing director of Microsoft Research Montréal, where he also led FATE Montréal, and director of research at Spotify, where he built its research organization on recommendation, search, and personalization. Fernando’s work has received special recognition and awards at SIGIR, CIKM, CSCW, WSDM, ISCRAM, and ECIR. He is the recipient of the 2017 British Computer Society Karen Spärck Jones Award and holds a CIFAR AI Chair. Fernando has co-organized several NIST TREC tracks, WSDM (2013), Strategic Workshop on Information Retrieval (2018), FAccT (2019), SIGIR (2021), and the CIFAR Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and the Curation of Culture (2019).  He received his BS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and his MS and PhD from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.