Kausik Lakkaraju is a doctoral candidate at the AI Institute of the University of South Carolina, specializing in evaluating AI systems through causal analysis. He has worked extensively with AI models spanning unimodal (text, image, and numeric/ time-series) and multimodal diversity in a variety of forms including foundations models, rule-based systems, and chatbots and with applications in finance, health, and education. He has worked closely with researchers at JP Morgan Chase Research leading to a tutorial on AI trustworthiness in finance at ICAIF, and he    has received many recognitions including best poster awards.

Biplav Srivastava, Ph.D., is a Professor of Computer Science at the AI Institute and Department of Computer Science at the University of South Carolina (USC). With over three decades of AI experience in industry and academia, he directs the 'AI for Society' group, which is investigating how to enable people to make rational decisions despite the real world complexities of poor data, changing goals, and limited resources by augmenting their cognitive limitations with technology. His work in AI spans the sub-fields of reasoning (planning, scheduling), knowledge extraction and representation (ontology, open data), learning (classification, deep, adversarial), and interaction (collaborative assistants), and extends their application for services (process automation, composition) and sustainability (governance - elections, water, traffic, health, power). Dr. Srivastava has been conducting research in trustworthy AI for a decade, introduced the first course on the topic at USC, and has led USC&s participation in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)'s Artificial Intelligence Consortium (AIC) since its inception in 2024.