Invited Spekers

Abhinav Valada Abhinav Valada is a Full Professor at the University of Freiburg, where he directs the Robot Learning Lab. He is affiliated with the Department of Computer Science, the BrainLinks-BrainTools center, and a founding faculty of the ELLIS Unit Freiburg. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg and his M.S. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. Abhinav’s research lies at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and computer vision, addressing fundamental problems in perception, state estimation, and decision making to enable robots to operate reliably in complex and diverse open-world settings. For his research, he received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in Robotics and Automation, IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award, NVIDIA Research Award, IROS Best Paper on Cognitive Robotics, among others. Abhinav is a DFG Emmy Noether AI Fellow, Scholar of the ELLIS Society, IEEE Senior Member, and Co-Chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Learning. He is a Senior Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters as well as an Associate Editor and Area Chair for multiple conferences and journals. Many aspects of his research have been prominently featured in wider media such as the Discovery Channel, NBC News, Business Times, and The Economic Times.

Andreas Malikopoulos is a Professor in the School of Civil & Environmental Eng. and the Director of the Information and Decision Science Lab at Cornell University. Prior to these appointments, he was the Terri Connor Kelly and John Kelly Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Eng. (2017-2023) and founding Director of the Sociotechnical Systems Center (2019-2023) at the Univ. of Delaware (UD). Before he joined UD, he was the Alvin M. Weinberg Fellow (2010-2017) in the Energy & Transportation Science Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Deputy Director of the Urban Dynamics Institute (2014-2017) at ORNL, and a Senior Researcher in General Motors Global Research & Development (2008-2010). He received a Diploma from the National Technical Univ. of Athens, Greece, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2004 and 2008, respectively, all in Mechanical Eng. His research interests are at the intersection of learning and control to enable systems—whether vehicles, robots, or large-scale infrastructures—to operate autonomously and achieve near-optimal performance while safely adapting to and interacting with dynamic environments. Dr. Malikopoulos is the recipient of several prizes and awards, including the 2007 Dare to Dream Opportunity Grant from the Univ. of Michigan Ross School of Business, the 2007 Univ. of Michigan Teaching Fellow, the 2010 Alvin M. Weinberg Fellowship, the 2019 IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Young Researcher Award, and the 2020 UD’s College of Engineering Outstanding Junior Faculty Award. He has been selected by the National Academy of Engineering to participate in the 2010 German-American Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, and a 2012 Kavli Frontiers of Science Scholar by the National Academy of Sciences. He is an Associate Editor of Automatica and IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, a Senior Editor of IEEE Trans. on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSS), a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Fellow of the ASME, and member of the Board of Governors and Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE ITSS.

Bassam Alrifaee  holds the Professorship for Adaptive Behavior of Autonomous Vehicles in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of the Bundeswehr (UniBw) Munich. His research focuses on the intelligent control of autonomous systems, with particular emphasis on distributed control, cooperative localization, software architectures, and experimental validation. Before joining UniBw Munich in 2024, he served as a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at RWTH Aachen University, where he founded the Cyber-Physical Mobility (CPM) group and the CPM Lab. In 2023, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Information and Decision Science Laboratory at the University of Delaware, USA. Prof. Alrifaee has secured research grants from various institutions and received awards for his advisory and editorial contributions. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

Cathy Wu is the Class of 1954 Career Development Professor at MIT, holding appointments in LIDS, CEE, and IDSS. She holds a Ph.D. in EECS from UC Berkeley, and B.S. and M.Eng. in EECS from MIT, and completed a Postdoc at Microsoft Research. Her research group studies machine learning for optimization with, a focus on urban mobility. She is broadly interested in enabling faster, evidence-driven decisions for socio-technical systems. Cathy is the recipient of the NSF CAREER (2023), the Ole Madsen Mentoring Award (2025), the IEEE ITS Best Dissertation Award (2019), and the CUTC Milton Pikarsky Memorial Award (2018). She serves on the Board of Governors for the IEEE ITSS, is an Associate Editor or Area Chair for ICML, NeurIPS, ICRA, and Transportation Research Part C, and served as Program Co-chair for RLC 2025. She is also the inaugural Chair and Co-founder of the REproducible Research In Transportation Engineering (RERITE) Working Group.

Jonas Mårtensson is Professor of Automatic Control at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. His research centers on decision-making and control systems theory with applications in transportation systems, with a particular focus on cooperative and connected vehicle systems, especially for heavy-duty vehicles. His work addresses model predictive and distributed control, coordination and optimization of large-scale traffic systems, and the integration of control, communication, and optimization methods to improve safety, energy efficiency, and sustainability in networked transportation systems. Prof. Mårtensson has extensive collaboration with industrial and societal partners and has contributed to the development of control and planning algorithms for cooperative vehicle systems, adaptive and predictive cruise control, and autonomous driving in collaboration with the Swedish automotive industry. Since 2021, he has served as Director of ITRL (Integrated Transport Research Lab) a multidisciplinary KTH research center conducting large-scale collaborative projects with industrial and societal actors, including field trials and real-world demonstrations. Prof. Mårtensson is an active member of IEEE and the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS). From 2026, he serves on the ITSS Board of Governors. He is Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems and for the ITSC conference. He was Program Chair of ITSC 2024 and serves on the Program Committee of FISTS 2026. He is also a member of the ITSS Technical Committee on Decision and Control in Transportation Systems and the IEEE CSS Technical Committee on Smart Cities.

Necmiye Ozay received her B.S. in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bogazici University in 2004, her M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University in 2006, and her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Northeastern University in 2010. Between 2010 and 2013, she was a Control and Dynamical Systems postdoctoral scholar at Caltech. In 2013, she joined the University of Michigan faculty, where she is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and of Robotics. Her research includes dynamical systems, control, optimization and formal methods, with applications in cyber-physical systems, system identification, verification and validation, safe autonomy and safe AI. She received a DARPA Young Faculty Award, an NSF CAREER Award, a NASA Early Career Faculty Award, a DARPA Director’s Fellowship, an ONR Young Investigator Award, and 2021 Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society. She is an IEEE Fellow and an associate editor of Automatica.

Neel Bhatt is a research scientist at the Center for Autonomy at the University of Texas at Austin, working with Ufuk Topcu and Atlas Wang. Neel’s research focuses on developing neurosymbolic architectures at the intersection of generative AI, assured active perception, prediction, and trustworthy sequential decision making for autonomous systems. Neel received his PhD in Mechatronics Engineering from the University of Waterloo in 2023, where he led perception and prediction development for the WATonoBus project, Canada’s first ministry-approved autonomous shuttle pilot. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Mechatronics and Robotics from the University of Toronto in 2018.

Rahul Mangharam builds safe autonomous systems at the intersection of formal methods, machine learning and controls. He applies his work to safety-critical autonomous vehicles, urban air mobility, life-critical medical devices, and AI Co-designers for complex systems. He is the Penn Director for the Department of Transportation's $20MM Safety21 National UTC [2023-2028] which focuses on technologies for safe and efficient movement of people and goods. Rahul is the Director of the Autoware Center of Excellence for Autonomous Driving, a consortium of 70+ companies and universities focused on open-source AV software for open-standards EV platforms. Rahul received the 2016 US Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) from President Obama for his work on Life-Critical Systems. He also received the 2016 Department of Energy’s CleanTech Prize (Regional), the 2014 IEEE Benjamin Franklin Key Award, 2013 NSF CAREER Award, 2012 Intel Early Faculty Career Award and was selected by the National Academy of Engineering for the 2012 and 2017 US Frontiers of Engineering. He has won several ACM and IEEE best paper awards in Cyber-Physical Systems, controls, machine learning, and education.