Invited Speakers
Dengxin Dai
Dengxin Dai (ETH Zürich) is a Lecturer working with the Computer Vision Lab at ETH Zurich. He is leading the research group TRACE-Zurich working on Autonomous Driving within the R&D project "TRACE: Toyota Research on Automated Cars in Europe". In 2016, he obtained his PhD at ETH Zurich under the supervision of Prof. Luc Van Gool and Prof. Gerhard Schmitt. During the PhD study, he was working on the project VarCity for City Modeling based on camera data. His current research interests include Robust Road Scene Understanding; Learning Driving Models; Human-Vehicle Communication; Sensor Fusion; and Multi-Task Learning.
Andreas Geiger
Andreas Geiger (University of Tübingen, MPI for Intelligent Systems) is a professor of computer science heading the Autonomous Vision Group (AVG). His group is part of the University of Tübingen and the MPI for Intelligent Systems located in Tübingen, Germany. He is interested in 3D scene understanding, reconstruction, motion estimation, generative modeling and sensori-motor control in the context of autonomous systems. His goal is to make artificial intelligent systems such as self-driving cars or household robots more autonomous, efficient, robust and safe.
Stefan Leutenegger
Stefan Leutenegger (Imperial College London) is a Senior Lecturer (USA equivalent Associate Professor) in Robotics. Besides leading the Smart Robotics Lab, he is co-leading the Dyson Robotics Lab with Prof. Andrew Davison. His research is centred around autonomous robot navigation: robots need dedicated sensing capabilities as well as algorithms for localization inside a potentially unknown environment. This includes localization and mapping with a suite of sensors, most importantly cameras, to be processed efficiently to yield accurate results at real-time.
Cyrill Stachniss
Cyrill Stachniss (University of Bonn) is a full professor at the University of Bonn and heads the lab for Photogrammetry and Robotics. Before working in Bonn, he was a lecturer at the University of Freiburg in Germany, a guest lecturer at the University of Zaragoza in Spain, and a senior researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in the group of Roland Siegwart. Cyrill Stachniss finished his habilitation in 2009 and received his Ph.D. thesis entitled “Exploration and Mapping with Mobile Robots” supervised by Wolfram Burgard at the University of Freiburg in 2006. From 2008-2013, he was an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, since 2010 a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow, and received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in 2013. Since 2015, he is a senior editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He is the spokesperson of the DFG Cluster of Excellence EXC 2070 ”PhenoRob – Robotics and Phenotyping for Sustainable Crop Production” and of the DFG Research Unit FOR 1505 ”Mapping on Demand”. He was furthermore involved in the coordination of several EC-funded FP7 and H2020 projects. In his research, he focuses on probabilistic techniques in the context of mobile robotics, navigation, and perception. Central areas of his research are solutions to the simultaneous localization and mapping problem, visual perception, robot learning, self-driving cars, agricultural robotics, and unmanned aerial vehicles.
Raquel Urtasun
Raquel Urtasun (Uber ATG, University of Toronto) is Uber ATG Chief Scientist and the Head of Uber ATG Toronto. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, a Canada Research Chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision and a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI. Prior to this, she was an Assistant Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC), an academic computer science institute affiliated with the University of Chicago. She was also a visiting professor at ETH Zurich during the spring semester of 2010. She received her Bachelors degree from Universidad Publica de Navarra in 2000, her Ph.D. degree from the Computer Science department at Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2006 and did her postdoc at MIT and UC Berkeley. She is a world leading expert in AI for self-driving cars. Her research interests include machine learning, computer vision, robotics, AI and remote sensing. Her lab was selected as an NVIDIA NVAIL lab. She is a recipient of an NSERC EWR Steacie Award, an NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award, a Ministry of Education and Innovation Early Researcher Award, three Google Faculty Research Awards, an Amazon Faculty Research Award, two NVIDIA Pioneer Research Awards, a Connaught New Researcher Award, a Fallona Family Research Award and two Best Paper Runner up Prize awarded at CVPR in 2013 and 2017 respectively. She was also named Chatelaine 2018 Woman of the year, and 2018 Toronto's top influencers by Adweek magazine.