Intelligent Vehicle Meets Urban: Safe And Certifiable Navigation And Control For Intelligent Vehicles In Complex Urban Scenarios

Presentation Topic: Connected and Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Opportunities

Prof. Cheng-Zhong Xu, IEEE Fellow, is the Dean of Faculty of Science and Technology and the Interim Director of Institute of Collaborative Innovation, University of Macau, and a Chair Professor of Computer and Information Science. He was a professor of Wayne State University and the Director of Institute of Advanced Computing of Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technologies, Chinese Academy of Sciences before he joined UM in 2019. Dr. Xu is a Chief Scientist of Key Project on Smart City of MOST, China, and a Principal Instigator of the Key Project on Autonomous Driving of FDCT, Macau SAR. Dr. Xu’s main research interests lie in parallel and distributed computing and cloud computing, in particular, with an emphasis on resource management for system performance, reliability, availability, power efficiency, and security, and in big data and data-driven intelligence applications in smart city and self-driving vehicles. The systems of particular interest include distributed systems and the Internet, servers and cloud data centers, scalable parallel computers, wireless embedded devices, and mobile edge systems. He published two research monographs and more than 300 peer-reviewed papers in journals and conference proceedings; his papers received over 10K citations with an H-index of 57. He was a Best Paper Nominee or Awardee of the 2013 IEEE High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), the 2013 ACM High-Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC), IEEE Cluster’2015, ICPP’2015, GPC’2018, UIC’2018, AIMS’2019. He also received more than 100 patents or PCT patents and spun off a business “Shenzhen Baidou Applied Technology” with a dedication to location-based services and technologies. Dr. Xu received the most prestigious “President’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching” of Wayne State University in 2002. He serves or served on a number of journal editorial boards, including IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing (TCC), IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (JPDC), Science China: Information Science and ZTE Communication. Dr. Xu has been the Chair of IEEE Technical Committee on Distributed Processing (TCDP) from 2015 to 2020. He obtained BSc and MSc degrees from Nanjing University in 1986 and 1989 respectively, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Hong Kong in 1993, all in Computer Science and Engineering.

Presentation Topic: Urban GNSS RTK: Challenges and Opportunities

Dr. Li-Ta Hsu, Limin Endowed Young Scholar in Aerospace Navigation, is currently an Associate Professor and Associate Head in the Department of Aeronautical and Aviation Engineering at PolyU, earned his BSc and Ph.D. degrees in aeronautics and astronautics from National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan, in 2007 and 2013 respectively. Winning a Student Paper Award from the Institute of Navigation (ION) in the U.S., he showed promising potential as a scholar early on. Once a visiting scholar at the University College London, and Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology; a JSPS postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo; a technical representative and a council member of ION; and currently an associate fellow of the United Kingdom’s Royal Institute of Navigation, Dr. Hsu garnered over ten years of R&D experience in the discipline of aerospace navigation. Since he joined PolyU in 2016, Dr. Hsu has undertaken numerous collaborative R&D projects on GNSS positioning for smartphones and intelligent vehicles, especially useful in highly urbanized cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Dr. Hsu has a keen research interest in everything related to GNSS positioning and signal processing, including GNSS real-time kinematic positioning and ways to improve GNSS performance under challenging reception conditions. He also charts new territory in unmanned autonomous systems (UAS) positioning using different signals of opportunity, visual positioning system, and LiDAR-based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). He has published more than 60 journal papers and is currently an associate editor in Navigation, Journal of the Institute of Navigation.

Presentation Topic: Autonomy in Aerial Systems

Prof. Markus Ryll is Professor of Autonomous Aerial Systems in the Department of Aerospace and Geodesy and the School of Engineering and Design at TU Munich. From 2018 to 2020 he served as Senior Research Scientist at the Robust Robotics Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. From 2014 to 2017 Markus was a Research Scientist at the RIS team at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France. He received a Ph.D. degree from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tuebingen, Germany in cooperation with the University of Stuttgart, Germany in 2015, obtained a Diploma in Mechatronics in 2008, and a Master Degree in medical engineering in 2010. Markus Ryll's main research interests are the design, control, and autonomy of robotic systems, mainly focused on aerial platforms.

Presentation Topic: Perception System – from Autonomous Driving to Autonomous Logistic

Prof Ming Liu graduated with his Ph.D. in Robotics from ETH Zürich. He is the director of the Intelligent Autonomous Driving Center of HKUST. He received various IEEE awards, including the IEEE IROS Young Professional Award in 2018 and 15 best paper awards or finalist awards, such as the Best Paper Award in Information for IEEE International Conference on Information and Automation 2013, the Best RoboCup Paper Award for IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System 2013, the Best Conference Paper Award for IEEE-CYBER 2015, and the Best Paper in Automation Award for IEEE-ICIA 2017, the Best Paper Awards for IEEE-ROBIO 2019 and IPIN2019.  He was the Program Chair of IEEE-RCAR 2016 and the Conference General Chair of ICVS 2017 and ICVS2019.  He published over 200 papers with h-index 45 and citation 7300+. His research interests include dynamic environment modeling, 3D mapping, machine learning, and visual control. He is particularly interested in the investigation of novel, real-time online approaches in solving autonomous driving, mobile robot mapping, and navigation. His team developed the first autonomous vehicle in Hong Kong in 2017. During COVID-19, his autonomous vehicles served several cities and were reported by 100+ media, including IEEE Spectrum and Xinhua.

Presentation Topic: Certifiably Correct Machine Perception

David M. Rosen is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Electrical & Computer Engineering and Mathematics at Northeastern University.  His research addresses the design of practical provably reliable methods for machine perception and control, using a combination of tools from optimization, differential geometry and topology, abstract algebra, and probabilistic inference.   He holds the degrees of BS in Mathematics from the California Institute of Technology (2008), MA in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin (2010), and ScD in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining NEU, he was a Research Scientist at Oculus Research (now Meta Reality Labs) in Seattle (2016-2018), and a Postdoctoral Associate in MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (2018-2021). His work has been recognized with the inaugural Best Paper Award at the 2016 International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, an RSS Pioneer Award at Robotics: Science and Systems 2019, and a Best Student Paper Award at Robotics: Science and Systems 2020.

Presentation Topic: Visual-inertial estimation and perception for autonomous vehicles

Guoquan (Paul) Huang is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering (ME), Computer and Information Sciences (CIS), and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), at the University of Delaware (UD), where he is leading the Robot Perception and Navigation Group (RPNG) and the autonomy research thrust at the Center for Autonomous and Robotic Systems (CARS). He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Zhejiang University and Principal Scientist at Meituan co-leading autonomous delivery. He was a Senior Consultant (2016-2018) at the Huawei 2012 Laboratories, and a Postdoctoral Associate (2012-2014) at MIT CSAIL (Marine Robotics). He received the B.Eng. (2002) in Automation (Electrical Engineering) from the University of Science and Technology Beijing, China, and the M.Sc. (2009) and Ph.D. (2012) in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota. His research interests focus on state estimation and spatial AI for robotics, including probabilistic sensing, localization, mapping, perception and planning of autonomous ground, aerial and underwater vehicles. He is an Associate Editors for IEEE Transactions on Robotics (TRO), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and IET Cyber-Systems and Robotics (CSR), as well as the two robotics flagship conferences (ICRA and IROS), and a Guest Editor for Sensors. Over the years, Dr. Huang has received various honors and awards including the 2006 Academic Excellence Fellowship from the University of Minnesota, 2011 Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad, 2015 UD Research Award (UDRF), 2015 NASA DE Space Research Seed Award, 2016 NSF CRII Award, 2018 SATEC Robotics Delegation (one of ten US experts invited by ASME), 2018 Google Daydream Faculty Research Award, 2019 Google AR/VR Faculty Research Award, 2019 Winner for the IROS FPV Drone Racing VIO Competition, 2020 Sigma Xi member, IEEE Senior member, and was the Finalists for the RSS 2009 Best Paper Award and the ICRA 2021 Best Paper Award in Robot Vision.