Margaret Brisbane

CIO and Director | Miami Dade County Information Technology Department

In her current role she is responsible for leading a team of IT professionals in servicing the technology needs of the County. The primary IT pillars are Security, Platforms, and Applications along with Administration, to support all operations. The team provides support to all County Departments including enterprise solution for Financial, Payroll, Human Resources, Public Safety, Legislative, Commerce, and the PeopleSoft systems. The team also supports data center operations, countywide network, radio systems, as well as document and asset management, and geospatial systems.

Prior to joining the County, Margaret served as Director of Service Delivery for Burger King Corporation. During her 20-year career she led the Telecommunications Center of Excellence for various Diageo brands, and worked on restaurant systems support as well as Point of Sales system implementation for various domestic and international locations.

Throughout her career, Margaret has been actively involved in the community and professional organizations. She is currently a member of the Technology Committee for both the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce and the Miami-Dade Beacon Council. She served as co-chair for the Community Services Committee for the FIU Alumni Circle and is a co-chair for the annual United Way Miami Women’s Leadership breakfast.  She is the Chair of the IT Women Virtual Mentoring Program and has mentored several scholarship recipients.  She established a mentoring program between the County’s IT department and a local high school IT Academy, which ran for 11 years.  She was the Chair for the 2007 – 2008 Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce Leadership Miami Program and was a member of the Executive Committee for 7 years. She was instrumental in developing and chairing the Chamber’s Youth Leadership program for 3 years. She has also participated as a mentor to several FIU and UM business students to continually innovate and enhance their technical and business skills. She leads a team to showcase innovative County technologies at the annual eMerge Americas conference.

Margaret holds a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in International Marketing from Florida International University (FIU) and a Master of Business Administration with Honors from Nova Southeastern University. She also received a certificate in Executive Leadership from Harvard University. She received the Torch award from FIU and was named Female Technology Leader of the Year by the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce. She recently received the “Ones to Watch” award from the CIO Executive Council and was nominated for the “Badass Woman of the Year”.

Ana Peralta Chammas

Director of Innovation | Miami-Dade County

With an eye for innovation, strategic vision, and multidisciplinary experience, Ana has helped advance IT strategy and the organizational transformation that drive the customer experience in Miami-Dade. By cultivating competencies in innovation infrastructure and digital strategy, she has the vision for what a Future Ready government needs to make community impact. With over 20 years in the field, Ana bridges gaps between creative and development teams, business users, and C-level executives to provide effective, customer-centric solutions.

Her experience includes directing the functions and programs related to the County’s information channels (miamidade.gov, 311 Answer Center, and Miami-Dade Television) as well as the development of civic engagement and customer service strategy for customers. Ana has cultivated long-standing relationships with public and private partners to enhance the customer experience tackling a municipal-wide open data platform, building a cross-municipal strategic alliance as well as the evolution of the County’s omnichannel presence. Ana is a long-standing member of the FIU Kopenhaver Center Leadership Council in CARTA’s Innovation Labs + Incubators. In this role, she has contributed valuable input in modernizing student curriculum and directly mentoring graduate students fighting to find a place in the Digital and Communications space in the private sector. In addition, as a Government Community of Interest leader, she is initiating global dialogue and crafting content as a Technology contributor in the BRMBOK for the BRM Institute. As a founding member of the Vizcaya Tech Advisory Committee, Ana worked with the museum’s IT team to establish its independent systems, network and security to tackle its digital footprint. This includes resilience and preservation projects using new media and tech like AR, VR and 3D exhibit experiences. Ana is passionate about community engagement and philanthropic causes providing outreach support for Pediatric and Breast Cancer, Habitat for Humanity, Alzheimer’s and expanding government reach in the Miami Tech movement with opportunities such as eMerge Americas, Miami Tech Month and local hack events. It is with bold tenacity and a passion for making community impact that she leaves an imprint as she moves full speed ahead as a driver in the digital revolution and renaissance that we are experiencing today.

David R. Chapman, PhD

Associate Professor | UM Department of Computer Science

Dr. Chapman has had three years of industry experience with Oceaneering International, where he developed a novel dynamic programming algorithm for edge detection for the purposes of subsea robotic navigation. Dr. Chapman’s present research emphasizes computer vision and image processing algorithms primarily with applications to medical imaging analytics. Recent research results include a novel semi-supervised image classification algorithm with applications to lung cancer screening as well as COVID19 classification, a novel algorithm for CT-scan image deep denoising, as well as an approach for domain invariant feature learning to reduce algorithmic bias for X-ray image screening for Tuberculosis.

Dr. Chapman is actively collaborating with RAD-AID International (they bring radiology to low-resource areas), Carestream Health (a worldwide provider of X-ray imaging systems), and the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security, to create the largest ever medical imaging dataset for Tuberculosis screening. He is also collaborating with RAD-AID International and Google Foundation to address and overcome issues of algorithmic bias that may affect clinical translation of diagnostic screening to low- and middle-income countries. Furthermore, he is collaborating with the National Alliance against Disparities in Public Health (NADPH) to improve AI infrastructure for minority-serving institutions. Finally, Dr. Chapman is working on the development of core computer vision and machine learning algorithms, including a novel methods for semi-supervised learning and edge detection.

Meet the Scientist Fast-Tracking Improvements in Digital Image Diagnostics

Eulois Cleckley

Director and CEO | Transportation and Public Works, Miami-Dade County

As Director and CEO, Cleckley oversees the 15^th largest public transit system in the country and the largest transit agency in the State of Florida. With approximately 4,000 employees, DTPW is one of the largest departments in Miami-Dade County government serving a population of 2.8 million residents.

Cleckley was the previous Executive Director of the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI) for the City and County of Denver. Cleckley led the creation of DOTI, and as Executive Director, he ran one of the city’s largest and most dynamic departments focused on modernizing Denver’s transportation system, constructing public facilities, maintaining sanitary and sewer systems and providing solid waste removal, recycling. and composting services. Cleckley also previously worked for the Houston-Galveston Area Council (HGAC), where he served as the Deputy Director of the Metropolitan Planning Organization which covers the eight-county Houston-Galveston region and provided overall strategic direction related to city and regional transportation planning, project development and implementation. Prior to his work with the HGAC, Cleckley served as Chief of Statewide and Regional Planning, and later acting Chief of the Field Operations Division, for Washington, D.C.’s District Department of Transportation (DDOT). His previous experience includes private consulting for local and state governments and working as a transportation specialist at the United States Department of Transportation (USDOT) and serving as the founder and CEO of a non-profit organization focused on community and business engagement.

In June 2020, Cleckley was unanimously elected to serve as President for the Colorado Chapter of the Conference of Minority Transportation Officials (COMTO), a national not-for-profit organization founded in 1971 and established to provide a forum for minority professionals in the transportation industry.

Mr. Cleckley has Transportation and Economics degrees from North Carolina A&T State University and a Global Logistics Specialist Professional Designation from California State University. He served as the President of the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) and is a member of the Transportation Research Board (TRB).

Matt Denesuk, PhD

Senior Vice President | Data Analytics & AI, Royal Caribbean Group

Matt Denesuk has devoted his life to using math & data to make the world work better.  He is currently SVP of Data Analytics & AI at Royal Caribbean Group, and leads the development and deployment of data- and data-science-driven capabilities across the company, in such areas as revenue management, industrial operations, customer experience, marketing, sales, hotel operations, and supply chain. He previously was Chief Data Science Officer, and a founder, of Noodle.ai, which provides AI-as-a-Service to enterprise and industrial firms. Prior to that, he was the Chief Data Science Officer of General Electric, leading the data, analytics, and Data Science functions across GE’s industrial business units.  He also led Smarter Planet Modeling & Analytics at IBM Research, and was a Partner in IBM’s Venture Capital Group. Matt has B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. Degrees from MIT and the University of Arizona.

Kenneth W. Goodman, PhD, FACMI, FACE

Director | UM Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy (a World Health Organization Collaborating Center in Ethics and Global Health Policy, one of 13 in the world and the only one in the U.S.)
Director | UM Ethics Programs
Director | UM Institute for Data Science and Computing, Data Ethics + Society

Dr. Goodman is also a Professor of Medicine at the University of Miami with appointments in the Department of Philosophy, School of Nursing and Health Studies, and Department of Public Health Sciences. He is immediate past chair of the Ethics Committee of the AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association), for which organization he co-founded the Ethical, Legal and Social Issues Working Group. He has been elected as a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI).  He is also a Fellow of the American College of Epidemiology (FACE), and past chair of its Ethics Committee, and of the Hastings Center.

Dr. Goodman is a co-founder of the North American Center for Ethics and Health Information Technology, a partnership with the Center for Bioethics at Indiana University. He also directs the Florida Bioethics Network and chairs the UHealth/University of Miami Hospital Ethics Committee and the Adult Ethics Committee for Jackson Memorial Health System.

Dr. Goodman’s research has emphasized issues in health information technology and in epidemiology and public health. His most recent book, Ethics, Medicine, and Information Technology: Intelligent Machines and the Transformation of Health Care (Cambridge University Press 2016) identifies and analyzes a number of issues in biomedical informatics. He has edited a book on the Terri Schiavo case for Oxford University Press, published a book about ethics and evidence-based medicine for Cambridge University Press, co-authored a book of case studies in ethics and health computing for Springer-Verlag and co-authored another volume of case studies in ethics in public health for the American Public Health Association. He has also co-authored a book on artificial intelligence, edited a book on ethics and medical computing, co-edited a volume on artificial intelligence, and published and presented numerous papers in bioethics, including end-of-life care, the philosophy of science, and computing.

Pete Martinez

Pete Martinez is Chairman and CEO of the SIVOTEC family of companies; high tech and scientific innovators at the massive intersection of Health, Sports, Technology, Big Data Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence. Martinez is also the Chairman of RaiseLink a FinTech platform for advanced investor-startup matching, engagement, and related services.

An international entrepreneur, he has led numerous high impact initiatives in the areas of high technology, business consulting, healthcare, and education. Martinez is a 32 year veteran of IBM, where he was Vice President of Global Business Services and Senior Executive for IBM South Florida. He is also a research affiliate at MIT, and avisiting professor at Florida Atlantic University and Florida International University.

With over 30 patents and publications he is a frequent international speaker while consulting to leading edge companies. He is a graduate of the University of Miami College of Engineering and past Chairman of the Florida Research Consortium. June 22, 2007 was proclaimed ‘Pete Martinez Day’ by the City of Boca Raton.

Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos, PhD

Assistant Professor | UM College of Engineering

Dr. Rhode-Barbarigos is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering with secondary appointments at the School of Architecture and the Department of Ocean Sciences at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.

He is an expert in structural morphology, which investigates the relationship between structures, as well as their form, function, material and forces. He focuses on lightweight structures, such as tensegrity systems, as well as coastal applications, including ecofriendly solutions for shoreline protection.

Yelena Yesha, PhD

Director | UM IDSC AI + Machine Learning Program and IDSC Innovation Officer
Knight Foundation Endowed Chair of Data Science and AI
Founding Director, NSF CARTA

At the University of Miami, Dr. Yelena Yesha is the Knight Foundation Endowed Chair of Data Science and AI at the Institute for Data Science and Computing (IDSC). At IDSC, Dr. Yesha is also the Innovation Officer and Head of International Relations. In this role, Dr. Yesha assists faculty in engaging government and industrial partners to collaborate with the University and consults with faculty on developing research ideas into innovations.

Dr. Yesha was the Founding Director of the National Science Foundation Center for Accelerated Real Time Analytics (CARTA), an NSF-funded Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) that aims to develop long-term partnerships among industry, academia, and government. CARTA partners with Rutgers University New Brunswick, North Carolina State University, the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), Tel Aviv University, and the University of Miami.

Dr. Yesha received her B.Sc. degrees in Computer Science and in Applied Mathematics from York University, Toronto, Canada, and her M.Sc. degree and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from The Ohio State University. She has published 11 books as author or editor, and more than 200 papers in prestigious refereed journals and refereed conference proceedings, and she has been awarded external funding in a total amount exceeding 45 million dollars. She is currently working with leading industrial companies and government agencies on new innovative technology in the areas of blockchains, cybersecurity, and big data analytics with applications to electronic commerce, climate change, and digital healthcare. Dr. Yesha is a Fellow of the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies.

Forbes magazine highlighted Dr. Yesha’s accomplishments in technology in a two-part profile: Part I: Dr. Yelena Yesha: Meet The Tenacious Pioneer Pushing Innovation To Address Real World Problems and Part II: Dr. Yelena Yesha: Pushing Technology Boundaries To Solve The World’s Biggest Problems.