Invited Speakers

Ken Goldberg is an artist, inventor, and roboticist. He is William S. Floyd Jr Distinguished Chair in Engineering at UC Berkeley and Chief Scientist at Ambidextrous Robotics. Ken is on the Editorial Board of the journal Science Robotics, served as Chair of the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department, and co-founded the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering. Short documentary films he co-wrote were selected for Sundance and one was nominated for an Emmy Award. Ken and his students have published 300 peer-reviewed papers, 9 US patents, and created award-winning artworks featured in 70 exhibits worldwide.

Ron Alterovitz is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He leads the Computational Robotics Research Group which develops novel algorithms for robots to learn and plan their motions, with a focus on enabling robots to perform new, less invasive medical procedures and to assist people in their homes. Dr. Alterovitz has co-authored a book on Motion Planning in Medicine, was co-awarded a patent for a medical device, and has received multiple best paper awards at robotics and computer-assisted medicine conferences. He is the recipient of an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award, two UNC Computer Science Department Excellence in Teaching Awards, and an NSF Early Career Development (CAREER) Award.

Ludovic Righetti is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the Tandon School of Engineering of New York University and a Senior Researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) in Tübingen, Germany. He leads the Machines in Motion Laboratory, where his research focuses on the planning and control of movements for autonomous robots, with a special emphasis on legged locomotion and manipulation. He is more broadly interested in questions at the intersection of decision making, automatic control, optimization, applied dynamical systems and machine learning and their application to physical systems.

Nicola Dragoni is Associate Professor in Distributed Systems and Security at DTU Compute, Technical University of Denmark, and Professor in Computer Engineering at Centre for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems, Örebro University, Sweden. He is also affiliated with the Copenhagen Center for Health Technology (CACHET) and the Nordic IoT Hub. He got a M.Sc. Degree and a Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of Bologna, Italy. His main research interests lie in the areas of pervasive computing and security, with focus on domains like Internet-of-Things, Fog computing and mobile systems. He has co-authored 100+ peer-reviewed papers in international journals and conference proceedings, and he has edited 3 journal special issues on security and dependability. He coordinates a research lab on secure pervasive computing, currently composed of 4 PhD students, 4 postdocs and several MSc/BSc students.

Dr. James Kuffner is the Chief Technology Officer at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) and serves as Area Lead, Cloud Intelligence. Dr. Kuffner received a Ph.D. from the Stanford University Dept. of Computer Science Robotics Laboratory in 1999, and was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo working on software and planning algorithms for humanoid robots. He joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in 2002. He is perhaps best known as co-inventor of the Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm, which has become a key standard benchmark for robot motion planning. He has published over 125 technical papers, holds more than 40 patents, and received the Okawa Foundation Award for Young Researchers in 2007. Dr. Kuffner continues to serve as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Flavio Bonomi serves as Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Nebbiolo Technologies, Inc. Before founding Nebbiolo Technologies, Mr. Bonomi was the founder and the Chief Technology Officer at IoXWorks, Inc, involved in consulting and advisory roles with a number of large corporations and startups in the field of IoT. Prior to IoXWorks, he was a Cisco Fellow, Vice President, and Head of the Advanced Architecture and Research Organization at Cisco Systems in San Jose, California. He was co-leading the vision and technology direction for Cisco’s Internet of Things initiative. Before joining Cisco in 1999, Mr. Bonomi was at AT&T Bell Labs, with architecture and research responsibilities, mostly relating to the evolution of the ATM technology, and then was Principal Architect at two Silicon Valley startups, ZeitNet and StratumOne. He received an Electrical Engineering degree from Pavia University in Italy, and a Master’s and PhD in Electrical Engineering degrees in 1981 and 1985 respectively, from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York

Dr. Ben Kehoe works in the field of Cloud Robotics—using the internet to enable robots to do more and better things—an area of IoT involving computation in the cloud and at the edge, Big Data, and machine learning. Approaching cloud computing from this angle, Ben focuses on developing business value rapidly through serverless (and servicefull) applications.

At iRobot, Ben guided the transition to a serverless architecture on AWS based on AWS Lambda and AWS IoT to support iRobot’s connected robot fleet. This architecture enables iRobot to focus on its core mission of building amazing robots with a minimum of development and operations effort. Ben seeks to amplify voices from dev, operations, and security to help the community shape the evolution of serverless and event-driven designs for IoT and cloud computing more broadly.

Dr. Thomas Moulard is a Sr. Software Engineer at AWS Robotics, Amazon Web Services. Dr. Moulard received a Ph.D. from LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse, France in 2012 and was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the AIST from 2012 to 2014.

From 2016 to 2018, Dr. Moulard worked for Alphabet/Google first as a software engineer on an undisclosed robotics project and then, as the Technical Lead of the Daydream Data Infrastructure team, designing cloud services to evaluate computer vision algorithms performance.

In 2018, Dr. Moulard joined the AWS RoboMaker team. AWS RoboMaker is a service that makes it easy to develop, test, and deploy intelligent robotics applications at scale.

Gajan is the CEO and Co-founder of Rapyuta Robotics, a cloud robotics platform company. Gajan completed his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich in cloud robotics and control systems under Prof. Raffaello D'Andrea in 2014. Gajan conceptualized and developed Rapyuta, a pioneering cloud robotics platform, during his work with the RoboEarth project. Gajan earned his B. Eng and M. Eng. from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan.

Dinesh Bharadia is faculty in ECE at the University of California San Diego. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2016 and was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT. Specifically, in his dissertation, he built prototype of a radio, that invalidated a long held assumption in wireless is that radios cannot transmit and receive at the same time on the same frequency. In recognition of his work, Dinesh was named to Forbes 30 under 30 for the science category worldwide list. Dinesh was also named a Marconi Young Scholar for outstanding wireless research and awarded the Michael Dukakis Leadership award. He was also named as one of the top 35 Innovators under 35 in the world by MIT Technology Review in 2016. Dinesh is also recipient of the Sarah and Thomas Kailath Stanford Graduate Fellowship. From 2013 to 2015, he was a Principal Scientist for Kumu Networks, where he worked to commercialize his research on full-duplex radios, building a product that underwent successful field trials at Tier 1 network providers worldwide like Deutsche Telekom and SK Telecom. This product is currently under deployment. His research interests include advancing the theory and design of modern wireless communication systems, wireless imaging, sensor networks and data-center networks.

Dr. Aakanksha Chowdhery is a Machine Learning Engineer in Google Brain. Her research contributions span across multiple areas of signal processing, machine learning, edge computing, and networked systems. She completed her PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2013. She was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research in 2013-15 and an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University in 2015-17. Prior to joining Stanford, she completed her Bachelor's degree at IIT Delhi where she received the President's Silver Medal Award. Her work has contributed to industry standards and consortia, such DSL standards and OpenFog Consortium. In 2012, she won the Paul Baran Marconi Young Scholar Award, given for the scientific contributions in the field of communications and the Internet.