Programme

Professor Hongliang Ren received his Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering (Specialized in Biomedical Engineering) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in 2008. He has been navigating his academic journey through Chinese University of Hong Kong, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, Children’s National Medical Center, United States, and National University of Singapore. He has served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Automation Science & Engineering (T-ASE) and Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing (MBEC). He has served as an active organizer and contributor on the committees of numerous robotics conferences, including a variety of roles in the flagship IEEE Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), IEEE Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), as well as other domain conferences such as MICCAI/ROBIO/BIOROB/ICIA/CVPR. He served as publicity chair for ICRA 2017, concurrently as Organizing Chair for ICRA 2017 workshop on Surgical Robots, and video chair for ICRA 2021. He has delivered numerous invited keynotes/talks at flagship conferences/workshops at ICRA/IROS/ROBIO/MICCAI/CVPR/ICIA. He is the recipient of IFMBE/IAMBE Early Career Award 2018, Interstellar Early Career Investigator Award 2018, Health Longevity Catalyst Award (2022 by NAM & RGC), NUS Engineering Young Researcher Award (2019), Interstellar Early Career Investigator Award (2018), ICBHI (Biomedical and Health Informatics) Young Investigator Award (2019), NUS Young Investigator Award (2013), EMedic Global Gold Medal (2017) and Silver Medal (2021), Best Paper Awards in IEEE-ROBIO (2019 & 2013), IEEE-RCAR2016, IEEE-CCECE2015, IEEE-Cyber2014 among 30+ others awards.

Dr. Liucheng Guo is an AI researcher and innovator specialising in AI software-hardware co-design, sustainable engineering, and human-machine interfaces. His work primarily focuses on developing sustainable and smart human-machine interfaces (HMI) for IoT, automotive, XR, and healthcare applications. Dr. Guo holds titles such as SMIEEE, FIET, FBCS, FRSA, as well as a visiting senior research fellow at King's College London. 

After completing Ph.D. in AI from Imperial College and entrepreneurship courses at Stanford Business School, Dr. Guo co-founded TG0 and invented next-generation sensing technology. At TG0, he spearheaded the integration of AI into human-machine interfaces, contributing to the company's recognition by Deloitte in 2021 as one of the UK's fastest-growing tech firms, with clients like Novares, Zwift and Airbus.

Fabio Bonsignorio is a professor in the Department of System Engineering and Automation. In 2009 he has been awarded the Santander Chair of Excellence in Robotics at the University Carlos III of Madrid.

Fabio Bonsignorio is founder and CEO of Heron Robots (advanced robotic solutions), www.heronrobots.com. He has been working in the R&D departments of several major Italian and American companies, mainly in the applications of intelligent systems and technology transfer with cordination/management responsibilities for some 20 years. He held academic research positions on robotics and lectured in robotics, industrial control systems and machine design at the Department of Mechanics of the University of Genova.

The preferred research topics are in robotics: cognition, control, modeling,  software architectures, robot swarms, intelligent agents.

He is author or co-author of about 100 publications in the areas of robotics, cognition and manufacturing systems in the last few years, since he became an almost full time researcher. His first paper on robot control dates back to 1985.

He is a member of IEEE/RAS, AAAI, CLAWAR, and euCognition.

He coordinates the EURON Special Interest Group on Good Experimental Methodology and Benchmarking in Robotics and is a board member of EURON III. He is an EU FP7 project reviewer.

Paolo Robuffo Giordano (Senior Member, IEEE) received the M.Sc. degree in computer science engineering in and the Ph.D. degree in systems engineering from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Rome, Italy, in 2001 and 2008, respectively. In 2007 and 2008, he spent one year as a Postdoc with the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics of the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Cologne, Germany. From 2008 to 2012, he was a Senior Research Scientist with the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany. He is currently a Senior CNRS Researcher head of the Rainbow group, IRISA and Inria, Rennes, France. He was the recipient of the 2018 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters best paper award. He is the Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

Yanpei Huang is a lecturer at the Department of Engineering and Design, University of Sussex, UK. Before joining Sussex, she was a post-doctoral researcher in the Human Robotics Group, at the Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London, U.K, where she investigated movement augmentation strategies in Virtual Reality. Yanpei Huang completed her Ph.D. study at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, with a focus on the development of intuitive human-machine interfaces for robotic surgery. Prior to the Ph.D. study, she received the M.Sc. degree in Manufacturing Systems & engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her current research interests include human–machine interaction and medical robotics.

Hajime Asama has been a Professor with the School of Engineering, UTokyo, since 2009, and the Director of RACE, since 2019. His main research interests include service robotics, distributed autonomous robotic systems, embodied brain science systems, and cognitive ergonomics. He is a fellow of JSME and RSJ. He was an AdCom Member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, from 2007 to 2009, and has been a Council Member of the Science Council of Japan, since 2017. He received the SICE System Integration Division System Integration Award for Academic Achievement, in 2010; and the JSME Award (Technical Achievement), in 2018. He was the Vice President of RSJ, from 2011 to 2012, and has been the President of IFAC, since 2020.