Invited Speakers
The following list of invited speakers is given in alphabetical order.
Wolfram Burgard is a full professor for Computer Science at the University of Freiburg where he heads the research lab for Autonomous Intelligent Systems. He studied Computer Science at the University of Dortmund and received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bonn. Wolfram Burgard is known for his contributions to the problem of mobile robot navigation, in particular with his probabilistic approaches to the problem of simultaneous localization and mapping. Wolfram Burgard is Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the European Association for Artificial Intelligence (EurAI) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He furthermore is member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. He received an Advanced Grant of the European Research Council (ERC) and the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, the most prestigious German research award.
I'm a new professor at Princeton, where I lead the Princeton Computational Imaging Lab since 2020, and I co-founded Algolux, where I lead research and development of the full autonomous driving stack. My group at Princeton explores imaging and computer vision approaches that allow computers to see and understand what seems invisible today — enabling super-human capabilities for the cameras in our vehicles, personal devices, microscopes, telescopes, and the instrumentation we use for fundamental physics. This includes today's capture and vision challenges, including harsh environmental conditions, e.g. imaging under ultra-low or high illumination or computer vision through dense fog, rain, and snow, imaging at ultra-fast or slow time scales, freezing light in motion, imaging at extreme scene scales, from super-resolution microscopy to kilometer-scale depth sensing, and imaging via proxies using nearby object surfaces as sensors instead. Researching vision systems end-to-end, my work lies at the intersection of optics, machine learning, optimization, computer graphics, and computer vision. I received my Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, and I was a postdoc at Stanford University. My doctoral dissertation won the Alain Fournier Ph.D. Dissertation Award and the SIGGRAPH outstanding doctoral dissertation award.
Alex Kendall is the co-founder and CEO of Wayve, the London-based company pioneering AI technology to enable autonomous vehicles to drive in complex, never-seen-before environments. Alex is a world expert in deep learning and computer vision. Before founding Wayve, Alex was a research fellow at Cambridge University where he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Vision and Robotics. His research has received numerous awards for scientific impact and made significant contributions to the field of computer vision and machine learning. He has been selected on the Royal Academy of Engineering's SME Leaders Programme and named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 innovators list. Alex's leadership and vision has led Wayve to become one of the most exciting start-ups in the burgeoning autonomous vehicle market.
Simon Lynen
Simon is currently Tech Lead/Manager at Google Zurich. His group develops the Visual Positioning Service (VPS) which provides low-latency, high precision image-based outdoor localization. Consumer devices with Google’s Augmented Reality capabilities leverage VPS to enable location aware experiences at global scale. In parallel VPS has grown into Google's platform for localizing and semantically annotating various large volume pixel sources such as from Google Lens and Photos. Simon previously pursued his PhD at the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich with a focus on visual navigation and localization algorithms for robotics, mobile devices and autonomous cars. Simon has contributed central pieces to the algorithm core of Google’s ARCore and has been part of the project ARCore team Mountain View, CA for three years, before becoming a full-time employee of Google mid 2015. In talks at TEDx Zurich, Lift, Zurich Minds and scientific conferences Simon has provided a behind-the-scenes view of the VPS technology, discussing latest technological capabilities.
Michael Milford conducts interdisciplinary research at the boundary between robotics, neuroscience and computer vision and is a multi-award winning educational entrepreneur. Michael's research models the neural mechanisms in the brain underlying tasks like navigation and perception to develop new technologies in challenging application domains such as all-weather, anytime positioning for autonomous vehicles. Michael currently holds the position of Acting Director of the QUT Centre for Robotics, as well as Professor at the Queensland University of Technology and Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow.
Torsten Sattler is a Senior Researcher at the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics and Cybernetics (CIIRC) at the Czech Technical University (CTU) in Prague, where he is currently building up his own research group working on 3D computer vision and machine learning as part of a tenure track position. Torsten joined CIIRC in July 2020. Before, he was a tenured Associate Professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. Previously, he was a Senior Researcher in the Computer Vision and Geometry group at ETH Zurich in Zurich, Switzerland. He obtained his PhD from RWTH Aachen University in Germany. His research interests include (large-scale) image-based localization, real-time localization and SLAM on mobile devices, 3D mapping and reconstruction, augmented and virtual reality, machine learning, and self-driving cars and other autonomous robots. His current work focuses on making algorithms for localization and mapping "smarter" by incorporating higher-level scene understanding. He has published papers in all major computer vision and robotics conferences and has had the privilege of being reviewer at many of these same conferences. Additionally, he was an Associate Editor for ICRA in 2019 and 2020 and has served as an area chair for CVPR in 2018 and 2022, ICCV in 2021, ECCV in 2020, and 3DV in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. He was a program chair for the German Conference on Pattern Recognition in 2020 and will be a program chair for the European Conference in Computer Vision in 2024. Furthermore, he is co-organizing workshops and tutorials on visual localization at ICCV 2021.