Keynote Speakers
Marco Pavone
Stanford University, USA
Topic: TBA
Dr. Marco Pavone is an Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University, where he is the Director of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory and Co-Director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford. Before joining Stanford, he was a Research Technologist within the Robotics Section at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He received a Ph.D. degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2010. His main research interests are in the development of methodologies for the analysis, design, and control of autonomous systems, with an emphasis on self-driving cars, autonomous aerospace vehicles, and future mobility systems. He is a recipient of several awards, including a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from President Barack Obama, an ONR Young Investigator Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and a NASA Early Career Faculty Award. He was identified by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) as one of America's 20 most highly promising investigators under the age of 40. His work has been recognized with best paper nominations or awards at the International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems, at the Field and Service Robotics Conference, at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference, and at NASA symposia.
Dr. Holger Caesar
TU Delft, Netherlands
Topic: TBA
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) have come a long way in the past two decades. Yet they are nowhere close to safely carrying our children to an arbitrary location. Until AVs become a net provider of safety, comfort and reduced carbon emissions, a lot of work remains to be done. The real world is full of challenging corner-cases and unexpected behavior. My research focuses on finding more scalable approaches to address these corner cases by collecting, mining, labeling, training from and evaluating sensor data more cleverly.
Dr. Rami Al-Rfou
WAYMO, USA
Topic: TBA
Rami Al-Rfou is a Staff Research Scientist at Waymo Research. He leads a team to build foundational models for motion and driving based on his expertise in large language models.
Previously, Rami was a technical lead for assisted writing applications such as SmartReply at Google Research. His research focused on improving pretraining large language modeling through token-free architectures, synthetic datasets constructed with knowledge-base based generative models, and improved sampling strategies for multilingual datasets. These pretrained language models, trained on +100 languages, are being utilized in query understanding, web page understanding, semantic search, and response ranking in conversations.
Al-Rfou’s research goes beyond language into designing better architecture to understand large-scale data such as graphs. Al-Rfou repurposes language modeling tools to produce novel graph learning algorithms that measure node and graph similarities. These modeling ideas have been deployed for spam detection and personalization application on large scale.
Al-Rfou received his PhD in Computer Science at Stony Brook University under the supervision of Prof. Steven Skiena in 2015. He investigated how to utilize deep learning representations to build truly massive multilingual NLP pipeline that supports +100 languages. Massively multilingual modeling significantly gained momentum in the recent years since then. Al-Rfou’s experience in sequential modeling and crosslingual applications span 10 years of academic and industrial research with applications that touched the lives of millions of users and open sourced code that helped thousands of students.
Dr. Xinshuo Weng
Nvidia, Canada
Topic: TBA
Xinshuo Weng is a research scientist at NVIDIA Research working with Marco Pavone. She received a Ph.D. in Robotics (2018-2022) and a Master in Computer Vision (2016-17) working with Kris Kitani at Carnegie Mellon University. She's also worked with Yaser Sheikh at Facebook Reality Lab as a research engineer to help build “Photorealistic Telepresence”. Her bachelor was received from Wuhan University. Her research interest lies in generative models and 3D computer vision for autonomous systems. She has developed 3D multi-object tracking systems such as AB3DMOT that received >1,300 stars on GitHub. Also, she is leading a few autonomous driving workshops at top conferences such as NeurIPS, IJCAI, ICCV, ICML and IROS. She was awarded a number of fellowships and nominations such as the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship for 2020 and Facebook Fellowship Finalist for 2021.
Specifically, Xinshuo's research spans the tasks of object detection, multi-object tracking, re-identification, trajectory prediction, and motion planning, with an ultimate goal of building an autonomous system such as self-driving cars that can safely interact with others in multi-agent dynamic environments. Towards this goal, she develops computational models to solve each individual task using machine learning techniques such as graph neural networks, transformers, generative adversarial networks and variational auto-encoders. To make the entire robot system robust and safe, Xinshuo's research also aims to seamlessly integrate models across tasks by building differentiable pipelines, propagating uncertainties from the upstream to downstream models, and exploring the most effective structure of the differentiable pipelines.
Fields: Computer Vision, Robotics, Machine Learning
Topics: 3D Computer Vision, Autonomous Driving, Generative Models, Perception, Imitation Learning
Dr. Yin Zhou
WAYMO, USA
Topic: TBA
Yin Zhou is currently a seniorresearch manager and senior staff research scientist at Waymo LLC. Beforejoining Waymo, he worked as a tech lead at Apple SPG between 2015 - 2019 and asa senior research assistant at Samsung Research America between 2014 - 2015,respectively. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from theUniversity of Delaware in 2014, where he received University ProfessionalDevelopment Award, Outstanding Research Project Award and Signal Processing& Communications Best Poster Award. He obtained his B. Eng degree fromBeijing Jiaotong University in 2009. Yin’s research interests include machinelearning, computer vision, robotics and image processing. He has more than 30publications in top-tier conferences and journals and holds 18 patents.