The Speakers

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.

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.