Speakers

Prof. Jing Zhou is a professor at the Faculty of Engineering and Science, University of Agder. She is the research director of the Priority Research Center of Mechatronics and the leader of the research group for Robotics and Automation. She received her Ph.D. degree in cybernetics from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2006. Her main research activities are in the areas of adaptive control, robust control, nonlinear control, network systems, multi-agent systems, robotics and vision, reinforcement learning and neural network control, and control applications to drilling and well systems, crane systems, marine vessels, and offshore energy systems. She has published 3 monographs and over 100 papers in international refereed journals and conferences. Dr. Zhou is associate editor of several journals, including IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, Systems and Control Letters, and IEEE CSS conferences. She has been actively involved in organizing international conferences, playing the roles of General Chair, Technical Program Committee Chair, Program Committee Member, Invited Session Chair, etc.

Professor Santosh Kumar Vishvakarma received the B.Sc. degree in Electronics from the University of Gorakhpur, Gorakhpur, in 1999, the M.Sc. degree in Electronics from Devi Ahilya Vishwavidyalaya, Indore, India, in 2001, the M.Tech. degree in Microelectronics from Punjab University, Chandigarh, India, in 2003, and the Ph.D. degree in Microelectronics and VLSI from the Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India, in 2010. From 2009 to 2010, he was with University Graduate Center, Kjeller, Norway, as a Post-Doctoral Fellow under European Union project “COMON”.

Professor Santosh Kumar Vishvakarma is with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Indore, MP, India as an Professor at IIT Indore. He is leading Nanoscale Devices and VLSI Circuit and System Design (NSDCS) Laboratory from 2010 onwards. He is engaged with teaching and research in the area of Energy-Efficient and Reliable SRAM Memory Design, Enhancing Performance and Configurable Architecture for DNN Accelerators, SRAM based In-Memory Computing Architecture for Edge AI, Reliable, Secure Design for IoT Application and Design for Reliability

Prof. Houxiang Zhang received Ph.D. degree in Mechanical and Electronic Engineering in 2003. From 2004, he worked as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Technical Aspects of Multimodal Systems (TAMS), Department of Informatics, Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Natural Sciences, University of Hamburg, Germany. In Feb. 2011, he finished the Habilitation on Informatics at University of Hamburg.

Dr. Zhang joined the NTNU (before 2016, Aalesund University College), Norway in April 2011 where he is a Professor on Robotics and Cybernetics. From 2011-2016, he hold a gift professorship on product and system design from the industry too. The focus of his research lies on two areas. One is on biological robots and modular robotics. The second focus is on virtual prototyping and maritime mechatronics. In these areas, he has published over 200 journal and conference papers and book chapters as author or co-author. Recently, he received four best paper awards at the Robotic conferences, and four finalist awards for best conference paper at IEEE Robotics and Automation conferences.

Prof. Linga Reddy Cenkeramaddi received the master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT Delhi), India, in 2004, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway, in 2011. He worked for Texas Instruments in mixed signal circuit design before joining the PhD program at NTNU. After finishing his PhD, he worked in radiation imaging for an atmosphere-space interaction monitor (ASIM mission to the International Space Station) at the University of Bergen, Norway from 2010 to 2012. At present, he is the group leader of the autonomous and cyber-physical systems (ACPS) research group and is working as a professor at the University of Agder, Campus Grimstad, Norway.

He has co-authored over 100 research publications that have been published in prestigious international journals and standard conferences. His main scientific interests are in cyber-physical systems, autonomous systems, and wireless embedded systems. He is the principal and co-principal investigator of many research grants from the Norwegian Research Council. He is a senior member of the IEEE. He is also a member of the editorial boards of various international journals, as well as the technical program committees of several IEEE conferences.

Manjesh Kumar Hanawal received the BTech degree in ECE from NIT, Bhopal, in 2004, the M.S. degree in ECE from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India, in 2009, and the Ph.D. degree from INRIA, Sophia Antipolis and University of Avignon, France, in 2013. After two years of postdoc at Boston University, he joined Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India, where he is an associate professor now. During 2004-2007 he was with CAIR, DRDO, working on various security-related projects. His research interests include communication networks, machine learning, and cybersecurity. He is a recipient of Inspire Faculty Award from DST and the Early Career Research Award from SERB. He has received several research grants like MATRIX from SERB and Indo-French Collaborative Scientific Research Programme from CEFIPRA.

Academic Background:

• B. E., BITS Pilani, Rajasthan, 2006

• M. Tech, IIT Bombay, 2009

• Ph. D., University of Lorraine, Nancy, France, 2014

Experience:

• Postdoc, Dept. EE, TU Eindhoven, Netherlands, 2015

• Assistant Professor, Dept. ECE, Amrita University, Kerala, 2016-2017

• Assistant Professor, Dept. EEE, BITS Pilani Hyderabad Campus, 2017-2019

• Assistant Professor, Dept. EE, IIT Palakkad, since 2019

Dr. Rama Krishna Sai Gorthi has been working as an Associate Professor in IIT Tirupati in the Department of Electrical Engineering, since 2017. Prior to this he was Associate Professor at Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Trivandrum, since 2011. He was a postdoctoral fellow at INRIA, France during 2009 to 2011. He did Ph.D. from IIT Madras and Masters (in Research) from IISc, both in Computer Vision. His teaching experience spans Signal Processing, Machine Learning, Machine Learning for Image Processing, Deep learning for Computer Vision and Computer Vision for both UG and PG students.

He has around 18 years of experience and expertise in the development and application of various image processing methods specifically for image restoration, inpainting and computer vision methods specifically for Visual Tracking, 3D reconstruction from active and passive Stereo, and Machine learning and Deep learning approaches for many real applications like blood cell classification, satellite image analysis and segmentation, face recognition and character recognition.

Dr. Naveen is an Assistant Professor at the newly established Indian Institute of Technology at Tirupati (IIT Tirupati) since July 2017. Before joining IIT Tirupati he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras, as a DST-INSPIRE faculty (Jan. 2016 to July 2017). He obtained his Ph.D degree in Dec. 2013 from the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, under the supervision of Prof. Anurag Kumar. Subsequently, he worked as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Laurent Massoulie at INRIA Saclay, France (Jan. 2014 to Dec. 2015). During Jan. 2006 to July 2007, he worked at the ISRO Satellite Centre, Bangalore as Scientist-C. His research interests include stochastic modeling and performance analysis of wireless networks, network economics, game theory, and optimal control.

Dr. Pooja Vyavahare is an Assistant Professor at Indian Institute of Technology at Tirupati since February 2019. Before joining IIT Tirupati, she was a post-doctoral research associate with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; under the supervision of Dr. Nitin Vaidya. She obtained her Ph.D from the Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Bombay, under the supervision of Prof. D. Manjunath and Prof. Nutan Limaye. Subsequently, she was briefly with CSE, IIT Delhi as a postdoc and later at the School of Computing and Electrical Engineering, IIT Mandi as a DST-INSPIRE faculty. Her research interests include Distributed function computation and optimization, Analysis of communication networks.

Dr. Subrahmanyam Gorthi is working as an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) - Tirupati from Aug 2016. Before Joining IIT-Tirupati, Dr. Gorthi worked as a Chief Engineer in the Health and Medical Equipment (HME) division of Samsung R&D Institute in Bangalore (SRI-B), India, for more than a year. During this period, he has contributed to developing post-processing clinical tools for the detection and prognosis of Dementia, through automated segmentation and analysis of structures in MR brain images. He worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children's Hospital for one and half year. He did his PhD in Medical Image Processing at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. He did his Masters (MSc(Engg.)) in Computational Science at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India. He did his Bachelors (B.Tech.) in Electrical and Electronics, at Nagarjuna University, India.

Dr. Gorthi’s current research areas include medical imaging, image processing, computer vision and signal processing. He has taught various courses in these areas that include computer vision, machine learning for image processing, digital signal processing, medical imaging. He has published more than 30 papers in reputed international Journals and Conferences.

Dr. PS Saikrishna is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Tirupati. He obtained his Ph.D. in systems and control from IIT Madras and M.Tech in Measurement & Instrumentation from IIT Roorkee. He has a rich industrial experience of 6 years, mainly in the area of engineering and design of control systems, with Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) and Andhra Pradesh Power Generation Corporation Ltd. He also has teaching experience of 2 years at BITS Pilani (Hyderabad Campus) before joining IIT Tirupati. His current research interests include Autonomous Systems, Robotics, and the Identification and control of cloud/fog/edge computing environments.