The Speakers

Chuchu Fan

Chuchu Fan is an Associate Professor (pre-tenure) in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT. Before that, she was a postdoc researcher at Caltech and got her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University. Her research group, Realm at MIT, works on developing computational tools that integrate rigorous mathematics into machine learning and AI, for the design, analysis, and verification of safe, large-scale, complex systems. Chuchu is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, an AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award, an ONR YIP Award, an RSS Outstanding Student Paper Award, an IEEE RAS Early Career Award, and the 2020 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.

George Pappas

George Pappas is the UPS Foundation Professor at the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Departments of Computer and Information Sciences, as well as Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics. He currently serves as the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and as the Director of the Raj and Neera Singh program in Artificial Intelligence. Pappas’s research focuses on control systems, robotics, autonomous systems, formal methods, and machine learning for safe and secure cyber-physical systems. He has received numerous awards, including the NSF PECASE, the Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize, the George S. Axelby Award, the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, and the George H. Heilmeier Faculty Excellence Award. Pappas has mentored more than fifty students and postdocs, now faculty in leading universities worldwide. He is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2024.

Michael Wagner

Starting his career in the 90s working with roboticist Red Whittaker on NASA projects at Carnegie Mellon University, Michael Wagner realized early on that the safety engineering of autonomous systems lagged far behind the rapid pace of their commercialization. He has been on a mission to solve this critical challenge since 2006, pioneering the field of autonomous vehicle safety and helping to establish it as a major focus in both research and industry. In 2014, he founded Edge Case Research to bring this vision to industry, and under his leadership the company has achieved substantial revenue growth and now serves key customers across the autonomous vehicle and defense industries. A visionary leader, Michael pairs an energetic, forward-looking approach with tangible business results, driving the autonomous technology industry toward a safer future.

Yiannis Kantaros

Yiannis Kantaros is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Patras, Greece, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University. Prior to joining WashU, he was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on machine learning, formal methods, and distributed control for autonomous robotic systems, with an emphasis on safe, distributed, and intelligent autonomy. He is the recipient of a 2024 NSF CAREER Award, the 2017–18 Outstanding Dissertation Research Award from Duke University, and the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE GlobalSIP 2014. His work was also recognized as a finalist for the Best Multi-Robot Systems Paper Award at ICRA 2024 and the Best Paper Award at ICCPS 2025.

Aliasghar Moj Arab

Dr. Aliasghar Moj Arab is a research professor at The City College of New York and NYU, where he leads ASAS Labs. He is also the founder of General Autonomy, which builds tools to make the verification and validation of autonomous systems faster and more reliable.

Gustavo Cardona

Gustavo A. Cardona received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and the M.S. degree in Industrial Engineering from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia, and the Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA, in 2025. His Ph.D. thesis focused on developing formal methods for scalable and robust planning in multi-robot systems, leveraging temporal logic and optimization to handle partial satisfaction of complex tasks under uncertainty. His work was recognized with the 2025 Outstanding Dissertation-Mechanical Engineering & Mechanics and the 2025 Elizabeth V. Stout Dissertation Award from the Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science. He has also held a research internship at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in 2024, where he worked on multi-truck coordination in warehouse environments. His research interests include formal methods, control theory, human-robot interaction, and machine learning.

Ahmad Amine

Ahmad Amine is a fourth-year PhD student in Electrical and Systems Engineering at Penn, advised by Professor Rahul Mangharam. His research focuses on safe, learning-based control for autonomous systems, with an emphasis on model predictive control, online system identification, and data-driven invariant-set learning. He studies how systems can learn from experience to improve control performance while ensuring safety when operating under unkown or uncertain dynamics, with applications in autonomous driving and robotics.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse