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Keynote Speaker
Prof Rolf Müller (Virginia Tech)
Talk Title:
From Bats to Bots: Bioinspired Embodied AI for Autonomy in Complex Environments
Bio:
Rolf Müller has studied the unique sensorimotor abilities of bats as a model for autonomy in complex natural environments for over 25 years. He received his degrees in neuroscience from the University of Tuebingen in Germany and completed postdoctoral training in electrical engineering at Yale University. He currently serves as the Lynn Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech and directs the university's Center for Bioinspired Science and Technology. He has been a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America since 2019. His current research focuses on the integration of AI and robotics for autonomy in complex natural environments. In his international activities, he has conducted research on east and southeast Asian bats for almost 20 years. His interdisciplinary research has been published in some of the most reputed journals in the respective fields such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Physics Review Letters, Nature Machine Learning, and the Journal of Experimental Biology. His work has been covered by international news outlets such as the New York Times, the BBC, MSNBC, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and Nature.
Invited Speakers
Prof Tony Quek (SUTD)
Talk Title:
AI-RAN Unleashed: A Pathway towards Physical AI and Token Economy
Bio:
Tony Q.S. Quek received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology, respectively. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he earned the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Currently, he is the Associate Provost (AI & Digital Innovation) and Cheng Tsang Man Chair Professor with Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). He also serves as the Director of the Future Communications R&D Programme, and the ST Engineering Distinguished Professor. His current research topics include wireless communications and networking, network intelligence, non-terrestrial networks, open radio access network, and 6G. His current research topics include wireless communications and networking, AI-RAN, non-terrestrial networks, open radio access network, and 6G.
Dr Quek received the 2008 Philip Yeo Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Research, the 2012 IEEE William R. Bennett Prize, the 2016 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, the 2017 CTTC Early Achievement Award, the 2017 IEEE ComSoc AP Outstanding Paper Award, the 2020 IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper Award, the 2020 IEEE Stephen O. Rice Prize, the 2020 Nokia Visiting Professorship, the 2022 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, the 2024 IIT Bombay International Award For Excellence in Research in Engineering and Technology, and the IEEE Communications Society WTC Recognition Award 2024. He is an IEEE Fellow, a WWRF Fellow, and a Fellow of the Academy of Engineering Singapore.
Dr Rosa So (A*STAR)
Talk Title:
AI-Based Optimization of Deep Brain Stimulation for the Treatment of Parkinson’s Disease
Bio:
Dr Rosa So is currently a Principal Scientist under the Healthcare and Medtech Division at Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR, as well as the Programme Director for AI for Science (AI4S) programme funded by NRF. She also holds an Adjunct Assistant Professor position in the Biomedical Engineering Department at the National University of Singapore. Dr So’s main research interest lies in neurotechnology and digital health applications. She graduated with a Bachelor of Science from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University and received her Doctor of Philosophy from the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. She is the recipient of the 2023 100 Womenin Technology Award.
Dr Zhang Yicheng (A*STAR)
Talk Title:
Advancing AI-enabled Aviation R&D to Future-Proof Singapore's Air Hub
Bio:
Dr Yicheng Zhang is a senior scientist and deputy head of the Intelligent Transportation Solutions Division at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR. He obtained his PhD degree from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU). He has participated in numerous industrial and research projects funded by NRF, A*STAR, EDB, LTA, and CAAS, and authored over ninety research papers published in journals and conferences on ITS-related subjects. His research interests include developing solutions for air traffic management and air traffic flow management, and improving traffic movements in smart cities. In 2019, he was awarded the Young Professionals Travelling Scholarship by the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society (ITSS). As a team member, he also received the Singapore Public Sector Transformation Award in 2020 and the Singapore MTI Firefly Award (Bronze) in 2024. He is listed as Top 2% scientists identified by Stanford University in 2024 and 2025.
Prof Cecilia Laschi (NUS)
Talk Title:
Integrating AI and Embodiment for Future Robotics
Bio:
Prof Cecilia Laschi is the Provost’s Chair Professor of Robotics at NUS, where she leads the Soft Robotics Lab. She is the Director of the Advanced Robotics Centre. She holds a PhD in Robotics from the University of Genoa and an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark. A pioneer in soft robotics, she explores marine applications of soft robots and their use in the biomedical field, with a focus on eldercare. She has worked in humanoid and neuro-robotics, applying brain models in humanoid robots. Prof Laschi is Editor-in-Chief of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics and holds key editorial roles in top robotics journals. An IEEE Fellow and active member of various scientific societies, she founded the IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft). She also co-founded RoboTech, a spin-off company in edutainment robotics.
Assoc Prof Harold Soh (NUS)
Talk Title:
Action Hallucination in Generative VLAs
Bio:
Harold Soh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore, where he leads the CLeAR lab (https://clear-nus.github.io/). His research focuses on AI/ML for trustworthy collaborative robots, especially generative modeling and decision-making. He received his Ph.D. from Imperial College London, where he worked on online learning for assistive robots. His work has been recognized with an R:SS’23 Early Career Spotlight and best paper awards at IROS'21 and IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. He is active in the human-robot interaction and robotics communities, and is also a Principal Investigator at the Smart Systems Institute and co-founder of TacnIQ, a startup developing sensor intelligence.
Asst Prof Yang Jianfei (NTU)
Talk Title:
Towards Efficient Robot Learning: An Action-to-Action Strategy
Bio:
Jianfei Yang is an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), where he leads the Multimodal Embodied AI and Robotic Systems (MARS) Lab. Prior to joining NTU, he ever conducted research at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Tokyo. He was recognized in the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list in 2024 and has been named among the World’s Top 2% Scientists since 2022. His research focuses on multimodal robot learning, human–robot interaction, and humanoid locomotion. Apart from teaching and research, he is actively working as a volunteer lead in the Singapore embodied AI community, organizing the “NRP Supply Chain Workshop” with NRP.
Asset Prof Jin Yueming (NUS)
Talk Title:
Towards Embodied AI for Surgical Robotics: From Generalizable Understanding to Digital Twin Simulation
Bio:
Dr Yueming JIN is an Assistant Professor at Department of Biomedical Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Engineering at National University of Singapore. She is also the PI of The N.1 and WisDM institutes in NUS. Her research interests are developing AI techniques for Healthcare, with an emphasized application to medical data analysis, surgical data science and robotics. She is listed in Forbes 30 under 30 Asia, Class 2024. She received Robert Brown Promising Researcher Award. She also received several premium paper awards, including three best paper awards in IJCARS-MICCAI 2021, ICRA 2021 and MedIA-MICCAI 2017; AAAI 2024 Most Influential Paper; IEEE TBME featuring paper 2025, etc. She serves as Program Chair of IPCAI’26, MIDL’26, MICCAI’28; Guest Associate Editor of IEEE TMI; Editorial Board Member of npj Digital Surgery. Her current Google Scholar citation is 8000+ with h-index 40.
Nanyang Asst Prof Li Wenhua (NTU)
Talk Title:
Advancing Spatial Intelligence in Embodied Agents
Bio:
Wanhua Li is currently an Nanyang Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore). Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, working under the supervision of Prof. Hanspeter Pfister. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Automation at Tsinghua University in 2022 and his B.S. degree in Computer Science from Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, in 2017. His research interests include Spatial Intelligence, Embodied AI, Neural Rendering, and Physical Intelligence. He has published over 30 scientific papers in TPAMI, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS and ICLR.
Asst Prof Armin Lederer (NUS)
Talk Title:
Event-Triggered Learning for Safe Control of Autonomous Systems
Bio:
Armin Lederer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He was awarded a Presidential Young Professorship and is a Mercator Fellow of the DFG Project ALeSCo. Before joining NUS in 2025, he was a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zurich working in the Institute for Machine Learning and an associated researcher of the ETH AI Center. He obtained his PhD, Master’s, and Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 2023, 2018, and 2015, respectively. His research focuses on ensuring the safety of unknown systems through a combination of techniques from model-based control and supervised machine learning. His goal is the development of theoretically rigorous and computationally efficient methods that can be straightforwardly integrated into robotic systems.
Assoc Prof Stefano V. Albrecht (NTU)
Talk Title:
Learning and Collaboration in Multi-Agent Settings
Bio:
Dr Stefano V. Albrecht is an Associate Professor in the College of Computing and Data Science at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Singapore. His research has developed state-of-the-art algorithms for reinforcement learning and multi-agent interaction, as well as real-world deployed applications in autonomous driving and multi-robot warehouses. Dr. Albrecht is Director of AI at London-based startup DeepFlow, which develops LLM-based multi-agent systems for human-AI workflow orchestration. He received research fellowships from the UK Royal Society, Royal Academy of Engineering, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Previously, Dr. Albrecht was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin working with Prof. Peter Stone. He obtained PhD & MSc degrees in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh, and a BSc degree in Computer Science from Technical University of Darmstadt. He is co-author of the textbook "Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning: Foundations and Modern Approaches" (MIT Press 2024), and author of the forthcoming book "Becoming an AI Researcher: Practical Advice for Graduate Students" (Cambridge University Press 2026).
Assoc Prof Foong Shaohui (SUTD)
Talk Title:
Sophisticated Simplicity: Doing More with Less in Aerial Robotics
Bio:
Associate Professor Foong Shaohui is the Provost's Chair Professor, Associate Head of the Engineering Product Development Pillar (Education), and Co-Director of the Dyson–SUTD Innovation Studios at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). He leads the Aerial Innovation Research (AIR) Laboratory, where his work focuses on novel unmanned systems, nature-inspired robotics, and efficient mechatronic design. Internationally recognized for pioneering nature-inspired aerial vehicles, Assoc Prof Foong is best known for his work on maple-seed-inspired monocopters. The Foldable Single Actuator Monocopter (F-SAM) — hailed as the world's most compact and simplest flying machine — has been featured in Popular Science and IEEE Spectrum. Building on this foundation, his group developed the SG60 Monocopter to commemorate Singapore's 60th year of independence, a highly efficient, long-endurance platform that showcases the real-world potential of monocopter technology. Beyond the laboratory, Assoc Prof Foong has spearheaded the development of specialized drone systems for critical public-sector operations, including rail viaduct bearing inspection, sheltered walkway cleaning, and high-altitude maintenance of the Supertrees at Gardens by the Bay. His research has been translated into real-world deployments through active industry partnerships, and as co-founder of Spinoff Robotics, he continues to bridge the gap between cutting-edge aerial research and industry application.
Asst Prof Guillaume Sartoretti (NUS)
Talk Title:
High-Dimensional Multi-Agent Robot Learning
Bio:
Guillaume Sartoretti joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at the National University of Singapore (NUS) as an Assistant Professor in 2019, where he founded the Multi-Agent Robotic Motion (MARMot) lab. Before that, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (USA), where he worked with Prof. Howie Choset. He received his Ph.D. in robotics from EPFL (Switzerland) in 2016 for his dissertation on "Control of Agent Swarms in Random Environments," under the supervision of Prof. Max-Olivier Hongler. His passion and research lie in understanding and eliciting emergent coordination/cooperation in large multi-agent systems, by identifying what information and mechanisms can help agents reason about their individual role/contribution to each other and to the team. Guillaume was a Manufacturing Futures Initiative (MFI) postdoctoral fellow at CMU in 2018-2019, was awarded an Amazon Research Awards in 2022, as well as an Outstanding Early Career Award from NUS' College of Design and Engineering in 2023.
Industrial Talk Speaker
Mr Zhang Kaifeng (Sharpa)
Talk Title:
How Tactile Sensing Revolutionizes Dexterous Manipulation
Bio:
Kaifeng Zhang is a Research Scientist and Head of Academia at Sharpa, an AI robotics company focused on developing dexterous robotic systems. In his current role, he leads an academia team dedicated to building the company's product ecosystem, advancing dexterous manipulation capabilities, and validating technical solutions for potential commercial applications. His research interests lie at the intersection of Robot Learning, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning. He is an alumnus of Nanjing University.
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