Organizers

Bio: Hozefa Jesawada is a Postdoctoral Researcher at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD), UAE. Prior to joining NYUAD he was awarded a research fellowship at the University of Salerno, Italy. He received Master's degree in Automatic Control from the Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI), Mumbai, and Ph.D. in Automatic control from the University of Sannio, Italy. His research interests include the applications of data-driven control, system identification, and learning-based methodologies for probabilistic non-linear systems.

Bio: Abdalla Swikir is an Assistant Professor of Robotics at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI), Abu Dhabi, UAE. He is an IEEE Senior Member and recipient of the 2023 IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award and the 2023 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters Best Paper Award. He also serves within several IEEE Robotics and Automation Society committees and is a member of the Advisory Board and Steering Committee of the International Elite Summer School in Robotics and Entrepreneurship.

Prior to joining MBZUAI, Dr. Swikir was a Senior Scientist and Teaching Coordinator at the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), where he led the Robot Learning research groups and coordinated a range of robotics and control courses. He also directed several high-profile EU projects spanning robotic design to the application of AI in large-scale robotic systems.

Dr. Swikir’s research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics, with a focus on AI-driven safe learning methodologies for robotic control. His work aims to design and analyze innovative robotic systems that adapt seamlessly to dynamic environments while maintaining rigorous safety standards. He is particularly interested in compositional analysis of large-scale interconnected systems and in leveraging symbolic control and control barrier functions to guarantee stability across complex networks.

Chuchu Fan

Bio: Chuchu Fan is an Associate Professor (pre-tenure) in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. Before that, she was a postdoc researcher at Caltech and got her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University. Her research group, Realm at MIT, works on using rigorous mathematics, including formal methods, machine learning, and control theory, for the design, analysis, and verification of safe autonomous systems. Chuchu is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award, and the 2020 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. 

Dongheui Lee

Bio: Dongheui Lee (이동희) is Full Professor of Autonomous Systems at Institute of Computer Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, TU Wien. She has been also leading a Human-centered assistive robotics group at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), since 2017. Prior, she was Associate Professor of Human-centered Assistive Robotics at the TUM Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Assistant Professor of Dynamic Human Robot Interaction at TUM, Project Assistant Professor at the University of Tokyo (2007-2009), and a research scientist at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) (2001-2004). She obtained a PhD degree from the department of Mechano-Informatics, University of Tokyo, Japan in 2007. She was awarded a Carl von Linde Fellowship at the TUM Institute for Advanced Study (2011) and a Helmholtz professorship prize (2015). She has served as Senior Editor and a founding member of IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L),  Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and an elected IEEE RAS AdCom member, opens an external URL in a new window. Her research interests include human motion understanding, human robot interaction, machine learning in robotics, and assistive robotics.