Autonomous Agents for Social Good 2025

Keynote Speakers

Elizabeth Bondi-Kelly – Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

Elizabeth Bondi-Kelly is an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. She has a PhD in Computer Science at Harvard University, where she was advised by Prof. Milind Tambe, and she was formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT through the CSAIL METEOR Fellowship. Her research interests are focused on artificial intelligence for social impact, particularly spanning the fields of multi-agent systems and machine learning. Her work, which has been published in venues such as AAAI, AAMAS, AIES, and IJCAI, has applications in conservation and public health, and has been deployed to support conservation efforts. She has been recognized with a Google Academic Research Award in 2024, MIT EECS Rising Stars in 2021, the Best Paper Runner Up at AAAI 2021, Best Application Demo Award at AAMAS 2019, Best Paper Award at SPIE DCS 2016, and an Honorable Mention for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program in 2017. She also founded and currently leads Try AI, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit committed to increasing diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in the field of AI through community-building educational programs, largely focused on AI for social impact.

Alexander Rodríguez – Assistant Professor, University of Michigan

Alexander is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He received his PhD in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2023. His research interests include problems at the intersection of machine learning, time series, multi-agent systems, uncertainty quantification, and scientific modeling. These are primarily motivated by public health, computational epidemiology, and community resilience. His work has been recognized with the best paper award at ICML AI4ABM 2022 and was awarded the 1st place in the Facebook/CMU COVID-19 Challenge and the 2nd place in the C3.ai COVID-19 Grand Challenge. He was also named a ‘Rising Star in Data Science’ by the University of Chicago Data Science Institute in 2021 and a ‘Rising Star in ML & AI’ by the University of Southern California in 2022. His dissertation received the 2024 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and the 2024 ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award Runner Up. His homepage is alrodri.engin.umich.edu.

More speakers to be announced soon!