Plenary Speakers

Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics; 

T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience Leadership Chair; 

Director, T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience

Colin F. Camerer is a behavioral economist. With the goal of improving the economic analysis of decisions, games, and markets, he uses methods from psychology and neuroscience, including eye-tracking, lesion patients, EEG, fMRI, wearable sensors, machine learning, and animal behavior. His recent research has focused on visual salience and habits. Camerer received his BA in quantitative studies from Johns Hopkins University, and he holds an MBA in finance and a PhD in decision theory both from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Before coming to Caltech in 1994, he was a faculty member at the University of Chicago GSB (1991–1994), the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (1983–1991), and the Kellogg Graduate School of Business at Northwestern University (1981–1983). He has held visiting professorships at Oxford University (2014–15) and Caltech (1987), and, since 2016, he has been a visiting fellow at the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and a fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. Camerer was president of the Society for Neuroeconomics from 2005 to 2006 and president of the Economic Science Association from 2001 to 2003, and he has served on many editorial boards. Since 2007, he has been a chair of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable. He has one patent accepted on "Active Learning Decision Engines." Camerer was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2013, and he received an honorary doctorate from the Stockholm School of Economics in 2019.

Associate Professor

Industrial & Operations Engineering

School of Information (courtesy appointment)

Jessie Yang is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan. She also holds a courtesy appointment at the School of Information and an affiliated position at the Robotics Institute. Prior to joining U-M, she was a postdoc at the Interactive Robotics Group of MIT and the SUTD-MIT International Design Center. She obtained her Ph.D. in Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (Human Factors) from Nanyang Technological University, working with Taezoon Park and Christopher D. Wickens. Her research interests include human-autonomy/robot interaction, human factors in high-risk industries, and user experience design.

Inaugural Head of Product Integrity for AD/ADAS

Sarah Thornton is the inaugural Head of Product Integrity for AD/ADAS at Woven by Toyota, where her team leads software safety and quality, cybersecurity, operational safety, and assurance cases. She received her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Stanford University in 2018. Her thesis was on designing autonomous vehicle motion planning algorithms with ethical considerations. She obtained her Master's in mechanical engineering from MIT in 2013 and her Bachelor's in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley in 2011. She previously worked at Nuro as a Systems Engineering TLM for Contingency Management, where her team was responsible for fault management, backup systems, and fail-operational Autonomy. Prior to Nuro, she worked as a Senior Robotics Engineer at Built Robotics, where she implemented an array of projects ranging from architecting parts of their safety system to developing high-level planning algorithms.