SPEAKERS

Hadas Kress-Gazit

Bio: Hadas Kress-Gazit is the Geoffrey S.M. Hedrick Sr. Professor at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and has been at Cornell since 2009. Her research focuses on formal methods for robotics and automation and more specifically on specification, verification, and synthesis for robotics – automatically creating verifiable robot controllers for complex high-level tasks. Her group explores different types of robotic systems including modular robots, soft robots and swarms and synthesizes (pun intended) ideas from different communities such as robotics, formal methods, control, hybrid systems and human-robot interaction. She is an IEEE fellow and has received multiple awards for her research, teaching and advocacy for groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM. She lives in Ithaca with her partner and two kids.

Laura Ferranti

Bio: Laura Ferranti received the M.Sc. degree in Control Engineering from the University of Rome ``Tor Vergata'', Rome, Italy, in 2012, and her PhD from Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, in 2017. She is currently an assistant professor in the Cognitive Robotics (CoR) Department, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands, where she leads the Reliable Robot Control (R2C) Lab. She is the recipient of an NWO Veni Grant from The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (2020), and of the Best Paper Award in Multi-robot Systems at ICRA 2019. Her research interests include optimization and optimal control with application in flight control, maritime transportation, robotics, and automotive.

Marco Hutter

Bio: Marco is a professor for robotic systems and director of the center for robotics at ETH Zurich. His research interests are in the development of novel machines and machines and their intelligence to operate in rough and challenging environments. Together with his team, he realized a number of legged robots, mobile manipulators, and autonomous excavators that find applications including industrial inspection, construction and forest operations, household assistance, and extraterrestrial exploration. Marco is part of the National Centers of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics, Digital Fabrication, and Automation, PI in various international projects (e.g. EU NI, DigiForest), and winner of international challenges such as the DARPA SubT competition. Moreover, Marco is a co-founder of several ETH Startups, such as ANYbotics AG or Gravis Robotics AG, which commercialize legged robots and autonomous construction equipment. Since 2024, he leads the Zurich Office of The AI Institute. 

Jinoh Lee

Bio: Jinoh Lee is a Senior Research Scientist with the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics, German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany, and is also an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, KAIST, South Korea. He was born in Seoul, South Korea. He received the B.S. Summa Cum Laude in mechanical engineering from Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea, in 2003, and the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, South Korea, in 2012. Before joining DLR in 2020, he held a postdoctoral position from 2012-2017 and a research scientist position from 2017-2020 at the Department of Advanced Robotics, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Genoa, Italy. In addition, he partly worked as a Research Consultant for Disney Research (DR) Los Angeles and Pittsburgh in the United States from 2017 to 2018.

Benjamin Burchfiel

Bio: Benjamin Burchfiel is a Senior Research Manager and Lead at the Toyota Research Institute for the Large Behavior Models team — TRI's push to create embodied foundation models for general-purpose robots. Before joining TRI, Ben was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Brown University and earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University. His research focuses on creating capable and adaptable autonomous agents that interact with the world in rich and dexterous ways.

Nicole Robinson

Bio: Dr Nicole Robinson is a Lecturer at Monash University in the Faculty of Engineering. She has created and built up an interdisciplinary research group that specialises across both scientific methods and novel engineering. Her research theme is to evaluate and improve the quality and success of human-robot teamwork. This work involves theoretical and applied human-robot interaction work in domestic and field settings, including for mobile, manipulator, mobile manipulator, humanoid and social robots. Prior to Monash, she was a Research Fellow with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision on Humanoid Robotics with Professor Peter Corke. She is also a Co-Founder and CEO of Lyro Robotics Pty Ltd, a deep-tech robotics start-up that builds and deploys intelligent pick and pack robots for order fulfillment around natural products. 

Hadas Kress-Gazit

Laura Ferranti

Jinoh Lee

Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee

Bio: Tapomayukh "Tapo" Bhattacharjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University where he directs the EmPRISE Lab. He completed his Ph.D. in Robotics from Georgia Institute of Technology and was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral research associate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He wants to enable robots to assist people with mobility limitations with activities of daily living. His work spans the fields of human-robot interaction, haptic perception, and robot manipulation and focuses on addressing the fundamental research question on how to leverage robot-world physical interactions in unstructured human environments to perform relevant activities of daily living.

Marco Hutter

Benjamin Burchfiel

Nicole Robinson

Jie Tan

Bio: Jie Tan is a Senior Staff Research Scientist and Tech Lead Manager in the robotics team of Google DeepMind. His research focuses on applying foundation models and deep reinforcement learning methods to robots, with interests spanning locomotion, navigation, manipulation, simulation, and sim-to-real transfer. Jie is an adjunct associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, and also teaches AI and robotics classes at Stanford University.

Tess Hellebrekers

Bio: Tess Hellebrekers is currently a Research Scientist at Meta AI Research. Her current research focuses on the intersection of tactile sensors, wearables, and dexterous manipulation. She also spent time as a postdoctoral researcher with Professor Abhinav Gupta exploring tactile sensing for robot learning. Her thesis work, “Hybrid Soft Sensing in Robotic Systems”, was completed with Professor Carmel Majidi in the Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in 2020.