Speakers and talks

Dr Tolga Birdal is an assistant professor (Lecturer) and a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow in the Department of Computing of Imperial College London. Previously, he was a senior Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Stanford University within the Geometric Computing Group of Prof. Leonidas Guibas. Tolga has defended his masters and Ph.D. theses at the Computer Vision Group under Chair for Computer Aided Medical Procedures, Technical University of Munich led by Prof. Nassir Navab. He was also a Doktorand at Siemens AG under supervision of Dr. Slobodan Ilic working on “Geometric Methods for 3D Reconstruction from Large Point Clouds”. His thesis was awarded the prestigious EMVA Young Professional Award. His current foci of interest involve topological / geometric machine learning and 3D computer vision. More theoretical work is aimed at investigating and interrogating limits in geometric computing and non-Euclidean inference as well as principles of deep learning. Tolga has several publications at the well-respected venues such as NeurIPS, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICLR, ICML, T-PAMI, ICRA, IROS, etc. He is the AC for CVPR, ICCV, ICML, ECCV and has currently program-chaired 3DV 2025. Aside from his academic life, Tolga has co-founded multiple companies including Befunky, a widely used web-based image editing platform.

Rita Fioresi is Full Professor at the FaBiT Department of the University of Bologna. Her research lies at the interface of pure mathematics, theoretical physics, and artificial intelligence, with expertise in Lie theory, supergeometry, quantum groups, and deep learning. After earning her PhD in Mathematics from UCLA, she held academic positions at UCLA and the University of Bologna, where she has served in roles ranging from researcher to associate professor, and since 2025, full professor. Her work bridges foundational mathematics—particularly Lie algebras, supergroups, and quantum geometry—with emerging developments in geometric deep learning, quantum computing, and mathematically grounded AI models. Professor Fioresi has led several major European research initiatives, including MSCA Doctoral Networks and Staff Exchange projects, and currently serves as Principal Investigator and Action Chair of multiple EU-funded programs. She is an active member of the international mathematical and AI communities, serving on editorial boards of leading journals such as Journal of Lie Theory, Communications in Mathematical Physics, and International Journal of Geometric Methods in Modern Physics, and is a member of the ELLIS Society.

F. Gay-Balmaz is an Associate Professor in Mathematics at NTU Singapore since 2023. Previously he was a researcher at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS, France) at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris (ENS). He received his Master (2004) and Ph.D. degrees (2009) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL, Switzerland) and his Habilitation (2018) at Sorbonne University. He was also a PostDoc at EPFL and at the California Institute of Technology (2009-2010). His research focuses on the development of structure-preserving methods for the modeling and discretization of partial differential equations arising in fluid dynamics and nonlinear elasticity. His approach is based on tools derived from differential geometry, symplectic and Poisson geometry, and geometric mechanics. His recent interests include geophysical fluid dynamics and nonequilibrium thermodynamics.

Simone Melzi is an Associate Professor at the University of Milano-Bicocca. He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Verona (2018) after graduating in Mathematics at the University of Milan (2013). He held postdoctoral positions at Sapienza University of Rome, École Polytechnique, and the University of Verona. His research focuses on geometry processing, 3D shape analysis, and Geometric deep learning. He was awarded the Eurographics Young Researcher Award , the EG-Italy PhD Thesis Award, a Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship (Seal of Excellence), and the BE-FOR-ERC grant. He is a Eurographics Junior Fellow and an ELLIS Scholar.

Hông Vân Lê is a senior scientist of the Institute of Mathematics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. She was the recipient of the Prize of the Moscow Mathematical Society in 1990, and the recipient of ICTP’s Majorana Prize in 1991. She works on Riemannian Geometry, Symplectic Topology, Representation Theory, Algebraic Topology, Information Geometry, and Mathematical Foundations of Machine Learning.