Invited Talks
Dr. Stuart Young, DARPA (Keynote Speaker)
Program Manager, Tactical Technology Office, DARPA, USA
Stuart Young joined DARPA in January 2020 as a program manager in the Tactical Technology Office. His expertise includes autonomous/unmanned ground and air vehicles, intelligent behaviors for unmanned systems, multi-agent teaming, applied artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and field robotics technologies.
Prior to joining DARPA, he served as program manager for AI for Maneuver and Mobility at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL), focusing on basic and applied research in efforts to develop intelligent behaviors and foundational autonomy for collaborating robotic teams operating in militarily relevant environments. He previously served as division chief for the Information Sciences Division at ARL, where he led a large team of researchers performing basic and applied research in intelligent behaviors for autonomous Army robots, machine learning for C3I, and natural language understanding for multi-domain battle. He also led the ARL Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance, in addition to serving as a branch chief and researcher dedicated to intelligent robotic behaviors. Young participated in numerous DARPA initiatives through his career including the Tactical Mobile Robotics, Mind’s Eye, DARPA Robotics Challenge, UGCV PerceptOR Integrator, and Learning Applied to Ground Robotics programs.
Young holds a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from the University of Washington. He earned a Master of Science degree in mechanical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School, and holds a Doctor of Philosophy in systems engineering from The George Washington University. He previously served 13 years in the U.S. Army Reserve as a captain in the Engineer Branch.
Prof. Urbashi Mitra, University of Southern California
Urbashi Mitra received the B.S. and the M.S. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Dr. Mitra is currently the Gordon S. Marshall Professor in Engineering at the University of Southern California with appointments in Electrical & Computer Engineering and Computer Science. She was the inaugural Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Molecular, Biological and Multi-scale Communications. She has been a member of the IEEE Information Theory Society's Board of Governors (2002-2007, 2012-2017), the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Technical Committee on Signal Processing for Communications and Networks (2012-2016), the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Awards Board (2017-2018), and the Chair/Vice-Chair of the IEEE Communication Theory Technical Committee (2017-2020).
Dr. Mitra is a Fellow of the IEEE. She is the recipient of: the 2021 USC Viterbi School of Engineering Senior Research Award, the 2017 IEEE Women in Communications Engineering Technical Achievement Award, a 2015 UK Royal Academy of Engineering Distinguished Visiting Professorship, a 2015 US Fulbright Scholar Award, a 2015-2016 UK Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship, IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer, 2012 Globecom Signal Processing for Communications Symposium Best Paper Award, 2012 US National Academy of Engineering Lillian Gilbreth Lectureship, the 2009 DCOSS Applications & Systems Best Paper Award, 2001 Okawa Foundation Award, 2000 Ohio State University’s College of Engineering Lumley Award for Research, and a 1996 National Science Foundation CAREER Award. Her research interests are in wireless communications, structured statistical methods, communication and sensor networks, biological communication systems, detection and estimation and the interface of communication, sensing and control.
Prof. Yasamin Mostofi, University of California Santa Barbara
Yasamin Mostofi received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. She is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California Santa Barbara. Yasamin is the recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the Antonio Ruberti Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society, the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award, and the IEEE Outstanding Engineer Award of Region 6 (more than 10 Western U.S. states), among other awards. She is a fellow of IEEE. She was a semi-plenary speaker at the 2018 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) and a keynote speaker at the 2018 Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED).
Yasamin's research is multi-disciplinary, in the two areas of wireless systems and robotics. Current high-level research thrusts include 1) RF sensing for several different applications such as through-wall imaging, occupancy analytics, smart health, and smart spaces; and 2) communication-aware robotics, UAV-assisted connectivity, and joint robotic path planning and communication. Her research has appeared in several reputable news venues such as BBC, Huffington Post, Daily Mail, Engadget, TechCrunch, NSF Science360, ACM News, and IEEE Spectrum, among others. Yasamin has served in many different professional capacities over the years. Recent samples include serving on the Board of Governors of IEEE CSS, serving as a senior editor for IEEE TCNS, and serving as a program co-chair for ACM MobiCom 2022, among others.
Prof. Amanda Prorok, University of Cambridge
Amanda Prorok is Professor of Collective Intelligence and Robotics in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Pembroke College. Prior to joining Cambridge, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She completed her PhD at EPFL, Switzerland.
Prof Prorok has been honored by numerous research awards, including an ERC Starting Grant, an Amazon Research Award, the EPSRC New Investigator Award, the Isaac Newton Trust Early Career Award, and several Best Paper awards. Her PhD thesis was awarded the Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) prize for the best thesis at EPFL in Computer Science.
She serves as Associate Editor for Autonomous Robots (AURO) and was the Chair of the 2021 IEEE International Symposium on Multi-Robot and Multi-Agent Systems.
Prof. Stephanie Gil, Harvard University
Stephanie is an Assistant Professor in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University. Her work centers around trust and coordination in multi-robot systems. She has held a Visiting Assistant Professor position at Stanford University during the summer of 2019, and an Assistant Professorship at Arizona State University from 2018-2020. She has received the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator award (2021) and the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2019). She has also been selected as a 2020 Sloan Research Fellow for her contributions at the intersection of robotics and communication. She completed her Ph.D. work (2014) on multi-robot coordination and control and her M.S. work (2009) on system identification and model learning. At MIT she collaborated extensively with the wireless communications group NetMIT, the result of which were two U.S. patents recently awarded in adaptive heterogeneous networks for multi-robot systems and accurate indoor positioning using Wi-Fi.
Dr. Gabriele Ferri, NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE)
Gabriele Ferri is a Research Scientist at the NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) in La Spezia, Italy. His research activities involve cooperative autonomy to control multi-robot systems in communication-limited environments. Over the years, Dr Ferri has developed and extensively tested autonomy strategies in real-world scenarios. The developed methods harness real-time data fusion and cooperation, and have been tailored to different applications, such as maritime surveillance, both with passive and active sonars. The distinctiveness of Dr Ferri’s research lies in his long lasting and successful effort in combining the development of innovative multi-robot solutions with their extensive validation in the field. The achieved results, witnessed by over than 100 publications in refereed conferences and journals, demonstrate that cooperative autonomy solutions not only can increase the effectiveness of complex robotic networks, but also that they can be actually implemented and used in real-world scenarios, typically hampered by harsh environments and limited communications, such as the underwater domain. In this regards, Dr. Ferri was the Scientist in Charge in many trials involving the deployment of complex heterogeneous multi-robot systems in the field, both at CMRE and at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.
His interest for multi-robot heterogeneous systems is witnessed also by his activity in robotics competitions. He has been leading the CMRE Robotics Competition Programme since 2013, and has been the General Chair of the Student AUV Challenge-Europe (SAUC-E), the leading AUV competition in Europe, since 2013. He had also the role of General Chair of the euRathlon 2015 Grand Challenge and of the European Robotics League (ERL) Emergency 2017, which were the first and unique competitions and events in the world to challenge international multi-domain robotics teams (marine, land and aerial) in realistic search and rescue scenarios held at a real power plant site.
In July 2020, Dr. Ferri was elected as the Coordinator of the euRobotics Marine Robotics Topic Group. In this role, he managed the writing of the marine robotics part of the euRobotics/SPARC Roadmap 2030, to help shaping the future development of European robotics.
Dr. Timothy Chung, Microsoft
Dr. Tim Chung, General Manager for Autonomy and Robotics, Microsoft
Dr. Timothy Chung joined Microsoft in March 2022 as General Manager for Autonomy and Robotics within the Strategic Missions and Technologies division, which focuses on next-generation technology solutions for government and commercial applications. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Chung served as a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Tactical Technology Office, where he led the OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics program and the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge. Previously, Dr. Chung served as an Assistant Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and Director of the Advanced Robotic Systems Engineering Laboratory (ARSENL). Dr. Chung holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University. He also earned Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology.