Speakers

Expert Speakers

Perla Maiolino (Oxford University)

Perla Maiolino (Member, IEEE) is currently an Associate Professor at the Engineering Science Department and a member of Oxford Robotic Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K., where she has established the ORI Soft Robotics Laboratory. Her research interests are related to the development of new technological solutions for soft robot sensors and actuators and to investigating the role of “softness” in soft robot perception for achieving autonomy and intelligent behaviors.

Yunzhu Li (Columbia University)

Yunzhu Li is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia, he was an Assistant Professor at UIUC CS. He also spent time as a Postdoc at the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab (SVL), working with Fei-Fei Li and Jiajun Wu. He received his PhD from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, where he was advised by Antonio Torralba and Russ Tedrake, and he obtained my bachelor's degree from Peking University.

Jen Jen Chung (University of Queensland)

Jen Jen Chung is an Associate Professor in Mechatronics within the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Queensland. Her current research interests include perception, planning and learning for robotic mobile manipulation, algorithms for robot navigation through human crowds, informative path planning and adaptive sampling. Prior to working at UQ, Jen Jen was a Senior Researcher in the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) at ETH Zürich from 2018-2022 and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Oregon State University researching multiagent learning methods from 2014-2017. She completed her Ph.D. on information-based exploration-exploitation strategies for autonomous soaring platforms at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics in the University of Sydney. She received her Ph.D. (2014) and B.E. (2010) from the University of Sydney.

Koh Hosoda (Kyoto University)

Koh Hosoda is a Japanese robotics professor. He holds a Ph.D. in Engineering from Kyoto University and is a Professor Emeritus at Osaka University. He has developed robotic arms and three-dimensional passive walking using pneumatic artificial rubber muscles. He is engaged in research on constructive intelligence, humanoid robots, and soft robotics. He is known for his work on a baby robot that learns to crawl, a cadaver-legged/artificial musculoskeletal hybrid robot, and the dog-like robot "PneuHound". He also has a track record in flexible arms and visual servoing. He has served as an assistant professor and associate professor at the Faculty of Engineering, Osaka University, a professor at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, a professor at the Graduate School of Engineering Science, and the editor-in-chief of the Japanese Robotics Society's "Advanced Robotics" magazine. As of April 2023, he is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Science at the Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University (Advanced Systems Science and Engineering Division).

Sourav Garg (Indian Institute of Technology)

Dr. Sourav Garg is an Assistant Professor at the Robotics Research Center (RRC), IIIT Hyderabad, India, specializing in the intersection of Robotics and Multimodal Foundation Models. His research primarily addresses the challenges of visual place recognition, localization, and navigation. His more recent research focuses on bridging the gap between high-level semantic reasoning and low-level control to develop autonomous agents that are robust to environmental and embodiment-level changes. With over 60 publications in top-tier venues such as CoRL, RA-L, CVPR, ECCV, and ICRA, he is an active leader in the academic community, frequently serving as an Area Chair / Associate Editor for premier conferences.

Krishan Rana (Sydekick Robotics)

Dr. Krishan Rana has worked actively in the development of both imitation and reinforcement learning systems for robotics, with a focus on their real-world deployment, including sample efficiency, speed, and safety. He is now leading the startup Sydekick Robotics, which focuses on building the infrastructure and algorithms that make these systems commercially deployable in industrial environments where throughput, yield, and robustness are key requirements for practical adoption.

Young Speakers

Karthik Ragunath Ananda Kumar (Tavus)

Karthik is AI Researcher at Tavus. He is building video agents that are trained for: (i) learning to reason/generate the visual characteristics of humans to render them in photo-realistic manner (video rendering models) with lip-syncing capabilities, (ii) learning to reason/generate the audio attributes of humans to mimic their voice (TTS models), and (iii) also learning to reason/generate their behavior (or) way they speak in terms of the words they use in different scenarios by some LLM-finetuning (post-training).

Soyoun (Soy) Choi (Harvard University)

Soyoun (Soy) studies at Harvard University, majoring in mechanical engineering with a minor in global health and health policy. At Harvard, she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Choi will pursue her doctorate in mechanical engineering at Stanford University. Choi aspires to develop proprioceptive robotic hands to advance dexterous manipulation and human-robot interaction. Outside of research, Choi is also an innovator and entrepreneur. She is the co-founder of Clozet, an AI-driven fashion commerce platform, and BlueBrown Partners, a venture capital fund supporting young engineering founders.

Shaohong Zhong (University of Oxford)

Shaohong Zhong received the M.Eng. degree in engineering science from the University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K., in 2021, where he is currently working toward the D.Phil. degree in engineering science with the Oxford Robotics Institute. His goal is to create robots that can be of service to people. His research interests include the application of generative modeling for tactile perception and soft robot control.

Adam Lee (University of Tokyo)

Adam Lee is a master's student at the University of Tokyo. His research interests include Generative AI and 3D world design.

Page updated

Report abuse