Charlie Catlett

Charlie Catlett joined DPI as senior research scientist after two decades as a senior computer scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. He also is a senior fellow at the University of Chicago’s Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation. His current research focuses on urban data analytics, urban modeling, and the design and use of sensing and “AI-at-the-edge” computing technologies embedded in urban infrastructure and the environment. He was the principal investigator of the NSF-funded “Array of Things” (AoT), an experimental urban infrastructure to measure the city’s environment with sensors and embedded (“edge”), remotely programmable artificial intelligence hardware. He also is a co-principal investigator of the NSF-funded “SAGE: Software-Defined Sensor Network” project, a joint effort including Northwestern University, Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago, and others.

Catlett served as Argonne’s chief information officer from 2007-2010. Before joining UChicago and Argonne in 2000, he was chief technology officer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From NCSA’s founding in 1985, he participated in the development of NSFNET, one of several early national networks that evolved into what we now experience as the Internet. During the exponential growth of the web following the release of NCSA’s Mosaic web browser, his team developed and supported NCSA’s scalable web server infrastructure.

Catlett founded the Urban Center for Computation and Data (UrbanCCD), now part of the Mansueto Institute, at the University of Chicago in 2012. He was recognized as one of Chicago’s “Tech 50” technology leaders by Crain’s Chicago Business in 2014, and nationally as one of “25 Doers, Dreamers & Drivers” of 2016 by Government Technology magazine. He also is the recipient of the Argonne Board of Governors 2019 Distinguished Performance Award. Catlett is a computer engineering graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Keynote title: Using AI and Edge Computing to Make Cities Smarter