Oliver Kroemer is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute (RI), affiliated with the Intelligent Autonomous Manipulation (IAM) Lab. His research focuses on enabling robots to learn versatile manipulation skills through lifelong frameworks, with applications in elder care, environmental maintenance, and hazardous operations. Developed methods for robot learning via physical interaction and reinforcement learning Created representations for contact states and motor primitives to improve skill generalization Research Interests: Spanning robot learning, tactile sensing, force-velocity control, and lifelong skill acquisition. Projects include Agile and Dynamic Interactions for Mobile Manipulation and Integrated Planning and Learning (Pillar project). Scientific Awards: Finalist, Georges Giralt Ph.D. Award (2015) Education: Masters & Bachelors in Engineering, University of Cambridge (2008) Ph.D., Technische Universitaet Darmstadt (2014) Students & Affiliates: Current PhD: Mark Lee, Sarvesh Patil, Saumya Saxena, Yunus Seker, Zilin Si Past PhD: Alex LaGrassa, Tabitha Lee, Qiao Liang, Shivam Vats, Kevin Zhang
Jieyu Zhao is an Assistant Professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC), part of the Viterbi School of Engineering. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA and was a NSF Computing Innovation Fellow at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on fairness in machine learning and NLP, particularly addressing biases in AI systems and promoting ethical AI practices. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science (UCLA, 2021), Postdoc at University of Maryland (2022-2023), and multiple research internships at Microsoft Research, Google Research, and AI2. She also completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia. Research interests include bias detection and mitigation in NLP models, trustworthy AI, and social responsibility in technology. Her work has been recognized with awards such as the EMNLP Best Long Paper Award (2017), Microsoft PhD Fellowship (2020), and EECS Rising Star (2021). She has delivered talks at conferences like NeurIPS, EMNLP, and USC Law School, and serves on committees including AAAI workflow chair. Her lab explores topics like alignment of LLMs, fairness in sequential decision-making, and ethical model interventions. She actively participates in initiatives promoting diversity and inclusion in AI, such as the UN-WOMEN Beijing panel on gender equality. Awards: 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics (2025), Capital One Research Award (2024), Microsoft PhD Fellowship (2020) Grants: NSF Computing Innovation Fellowship, USC Viterbi funding Labs/Teams: Leads the USC Lab focused on trustworthy AI and ethical NLP
Federico ZANETTIN is a Full Professor in the Department of Comparative Linguistic and Cultural Studies at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. His research focuses on translation studies with particular emphasis on corpus linguistics, graphic narrative translation, and journalistic translation. He maintains an active presence in the academic community through editorial work and research collaborations. Professor ZANETTIN's research interests span multiple areas of translation studies. He is particularly known for his work on corpus linguistics and its applications to translation analysis, with a focus on creating and using linguistic databases. His research on the translation of graphic narratives examines the verbal and visual aspects of translating comics and graphic novels across cultures. Additionally, he investigates journalistic translation , analyzing how information is translated and disseminated across media platforms. His scholarly work demonstrates consistent productivity, with numerous publications that explore the intersection of translation, culture, and media. Professor ZANETTIN's research shows particular strength in analyzing adaptation processes across linguistic, cultural, and modal boundaries, both synchronically and diachronically. Professor ZANETTIN serves on several important editorial boards: Co-editor of inTRAlinea Member of the international advisory board for The Translator Member of the international advisory board for Translang Member of the international advisory board for Entreculturas Member of the publications committee for Transletters. International Journal of Translators and Interpreters Member of the scientific committee for the Book series Interactio He is also frequently called upon as a referee for prestigious research projects, including those funded by The British Academy (UK), MIUR (Ministry of Education, University and Research), Italy, CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), Spain, NRC (National Research Council), Canada, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece, and SNSF (Swiss National Science Foundation). Professor ZANETTIN teaches courses in English language and translation at both undergraduate and graduate levels, focusing on European, American, and postcolonial languages and literatures. His teaching reflects his research expertise in translation studies and cross-cultural communication.
Catherine Lai is a Reader (~Associate Professor) in the Department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh, with strong affiliations to the Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) and the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation (ILCC) in the School of Informatics. She is based in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences and is actively involved in research, teaching, and academic service. Department: Department of Linguistics and English Language School: School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences Research Institutes: Centre for Speech Technology Research, Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation Email: C.Lai@ed.ac.uk Her research centers on the role of prosody—non-lexical aspects of speech—in spoken communication. She investigates how prosody contributes to discourse structure, information structure, and affect in dialogue, using interdisciplinary methods from linguistics and machine learning. Her work bridges theoretical linguistics and practical speech technology, aiming to improve spoken language understanding and synthesis systems. She is particularly interested in how prosody shapes listener expectations and how affect and topic are expressed and perceived in conversation. Her recent publications reflect a strong focus on self-supervised learning in speech models, emotion recognition, ASR error correction using large language models, cognitive state classification, and ethical considerations in language technology. She explores topics such as the uncanny valley in synthetic speech, gender expression through voice, and community-centered development of language technologies. Prize from Scopus Profile Catherine Lai has supervised several PhD students, including Leimin Tian and Yuanchao Li, and has been involved in significant research projects, such as a Toyota-funded initiative on spoken dialogue for robot companions. She has secured multiple grants and leads a research agenda that integrates theoretical inquiry with real-world applications in assistive technologies and social science. Her academic service includes organizing major conferences like Interspeech and UK and Ireland Speech. She is a key member of research teams at CSTR and ILCC, collaborating across disciplines to advance the understanding of spoken communication and the development of robust, ethical speech technologies.
WANG Ye is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS). He holds a PhD in Information Technology from Tampere University of Technology, Finland, and has been a tenured faculty member at NUS since 2002, following his industry research role at Nokia Research Center. He is the director of the Sound and Music Computing Lab at NUS, leading cutting-edge research in AI-driven music and health technologies. PhD, Information Technology, Tampere University of Technology, Finland (2002) MSc, Telecommunications, Braunschweig University of Technology, Germany (1993) BSc, Telecommunications, South China University of Technology, China (1983) His research is centered on Sound and Music Computing for Human Health and Potential (SMC4HHP) , with a focus on eHealth, eLearning, mobile/wearable computing, and music information retrieval. His work spans AI for stroke rehabilitation, language learning through singing, singing voice synthesis, and automatic music transcription. He has pioneered systems like SLIONS (language learning via karaoke), CocoLyricist (AI co-creation for stroke recovery), and SinTechSVS (expressive singing voice synthesis). The latest articles highlight a strong trend in AI-driven music and health technologies , particularly in controllable lyric generation, singing voice synthesis, automatic pronunciation assessment, and multimodal music transcription. The research increasingly integrates large language models, explainable AI, fairness, and real-world deployment, reflecting a shift from theoretical exploration to practical, human-centered applications in healthcare and education. Dr. Wang has received numerous scientific honors, including: Best Paper Awards at ACM MM, ISMIR, IEEE ISM, and CHI First Prize, Asia Pacific Assistive, Rehabilitative, and Therapeutic Technologies Challenge (2015) Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, NUS School of Computing (2024) Top Paper Award, ACM Multimedia 2022 AI in Medicine Collaborative Grant for CocoLyricist project He has supervised over 11 PhD and 20 MComp students and is currently guiding six PhD candidates. His grants come from MOE, NRF, A*STAR, Nokia, and Smule. He has served as General Chair of ISMIR2017 and TPC Co-Chair of ICOT2017, and is on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia and Journal of New Music Research. He has also developed and taught the first course on Sound and Music Computing in Singapore. Dr. Wang leads the Sound and Music Computing Lab (SMC Lab) , a multidisciplinary team exploring the synergy of music computing, AI, mobile technology, and cloud systems for health and education. The lab actively collaborates with medical institutions such as NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, Singapore General Hospital, and Harvard Medical School, and is currently working on projects in AI-supported language learning, stroke rehabilitation, and intelligent music interfaces.
Roles & Affiliations: Manolis Savva is an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University's School of Computing Science and holds a Canada Research Chair in Computer Graphics. He leads research in 3D scene understanding, with applications in graphics, vision, and robotics. Previously, he was a researcher at Facebook AI and Princeton University. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science (2016), Stanford University, advised by Pat Hanrahan B.A. in Physics and Computer Science (2009), Cornell University Research Interests: His work focuses on analyzing, organizing, and generating 3D content, particularly for holistic scene understanding. Key areas include articulated objects, embodied AI, and datasets like ScanNet , Matterport3D , and Habitat . His methods drive applications in robotics, autonomous agents, and virtual environments. Publications Trends: Recent work emphasizes generative models (e.g., SINGAPO for articulated object parts), embodied AI benchmarks (Habitat), and multimodal scene analysis. His papers often address challenges in scalability, realism, and cross-modal fusion for 3D environments. Awards: CHCCS Early Career Researcher Award (2022) ICLR 2023 Outstanding Paper Award ICCV 2019 Best Paper Nomination (Habitat) Advising & Grants: Supervised over 15 graduate students, many advancing to top PhD programs and tech companies. Active in grants for embodied AI, scene understanding, and robotics. Labs/Teams: Leads the 3DLG (3D Learning Group) and GrUVi (Graphics and Vision) groups at SFU. Collaborates extensively with industry (e.g., Meta, NVIDIA) on AI-driven 3D research.
Dr. Oana Cocarascu is a Senior Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Informatics, Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences, King's College London. She holds a PhD and MEng in Computing (Artificial Intelligence) from Imperial College London and conducts applied research focusing on how artificial intelligence can be deployed to support real-world applications, with machine learning and natural language processing as core components of her work. Her research interests span argument mining, explainable AI, machine learning, natural language processing, and symbolic reasoning. She is particularly focused on developing AI systems that can provide transparent, accountable, and ethical decision-making processes. Her work addresses critical challenges in bias mitigation, fairness metrics, fact verification systems, and argumentation-based explanations for complex AI decisions. Analysis of her recent publications (2023-2025) reveals a strong focus on fairness in AI systems, with particular attention to individual fairness metrics and nuanced evaluation frameworks. She has made significant contributions to fact verification systems, especially in multimodal contexts involving charts and tabular data. Her work increasingly integrates argumentation theory with natural language processing to create explainable AI systems that can justify their decisions through structured reasoning. Dr. Cocarascu leads an EPSRC-funded project titled 'A framework for evaluating and explaining the robustness of NLP models' (2024-2027) and is actively involved in the Natural Language Processing Group at KCL. Her research fingerprint shows strong activity in argumentation (100%), decision-making (74%), artificial intelligence (50%), explainable AI (39%), and bias mitigation (35%). She has contributed to numerous high-impact publications in top venues including ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, and the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, with a particular focus on making AI systems more transparent, accountable, and aligned with human values. Her work intersects with UN Sustainable Development Goals, particularly those related to reducing inequality and building resilient infrastructure.
Timothy M. Hospedales is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour within the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh . He also serves as VP AI and Head of Samsung AI Research Centre Europe . His research focuses on efficient and robust AI , emphasizing meta-learning , lifelong transfer-learning , and domain adaptation in both probabilistic and deep learning frameworks. Applications span computer vision , vision and language , reinforcement learning for robotics , and finance . Professor at University of Edinburgh (2020–present) ELLIS Fellow (2021) Head of Samsung AI Research Europe (2020–present) Founding Director of Applied Machine Learning Lab at QMUL (2012–2016) His work includes pioneering contributions to meta-learning , few-shot learning , and self-supervised methods , with notable awards such as the Best Paper Prize at ICML AutoML 2018 and Best Student Paper at ICPR 2018 . He has co-authored 15+ recent papers on topics like Vision-Language Models , Medical AI Fairness , and Diffusion Model Optimization . He served as Program Co-Chair for BMVC 2018 and AAAI 2022 , and authored a book on Visual Adaptation in the Deep Learning Era (2022). Co-Chair, BMVC 2018 Guest Editor, IET CV Special Issue (2016) Keynote Speaker at TASK-CV Workshop (ECCV 2016) Special Issue on Fewer Labels (IEEE PAMI 2020) His leadership extends to organizing workshops like the Learning-to-Learn Workshop at ICLR 2021 , Meta-Learning Workshop at NeurIPS 2020 , and Domain Generalisation Workshop at ICLR 2023 . Current projects include Meta-Omnium (CVPR 2023) for general-purpose meta-learning and MetaAudio (ICANN 2022) for few-shot audio classification benchmarks.
Achuta Kadambi, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor at UCLA in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, leading an interdisciplinary research group focused on AI, computational imaging, and bias mitigation in medical technologies. He recruits PhD students from EE, CS, and Bioengineering departments and has commercialized research through two California-based companies. His research investigates the intersection of physics and artificial intelligence, with a focus on unbiased low-level vision systems. Current projects explore how light transport interacts with human skin variations to identify and correct imaging biases in facial recognition and medical devices. His work has produced over 70 patents, with 30+ issued, and a textbook Computational Imaging (MIT Press, 2022). NSF CAREER Award (2021) for light transport bias research DARPA Young Faculty Award (2021) for AI and medical imaging innovations ARO Young Investigator Program (2021) for computational sensing IEEE-HKN Under 35 Award (2022) for inclusive EECS inventions Forbes 30 Under 30 recognition His recent publications focus on polarization imaging, 3D Gaussian splatting, synthetic data generation for healthcare, and bias mitigation in machine learning. Collaborations with UCLA medical school faculty, including Dr. Laleh Jalilian, aim to deploy these innovations in clinical settings. Current teaching includes ECE 149: Foundations of Computer Vision (Fall 2024, Spring 2025) and ECE 102: Signals and Systems (Winter 2024).
Adriana Tapus is a Full Professor at ENSTA Paris, affiliated with Institut Polytechnique de Paris, leading the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Laboratory (SAR) within the Computer Science and Systems Engineering Unit (U2IS). She holds an HDR (Habilitation) and a PhD from EPFL, Switzerland, with postdoctoral experience at USC. Her research focuses on socially assistive robotics, human-robot interaction (HRI), and personalized therapy for individuals with physical/cognitive impairments. She directs the IP Paris Doctoral School and coordinates national/international projects like the EU-funded ENRICHME and SWEET. Education: PhD in Mobile Robotics, EPFL (2005) Habilitation (HDR), ENSTA Paris (2011) M.S. Computer Science, University Joseph Fourier Engineer, Politehnica University of Bucharest Research Interests: Tapus pioneers socially assistive robotics, integrating machine learning, human modeling, and multimodal communication (verbal/non-verbal/para-verbal). Her work addresses adaptive therapies for vulnerable populations using robotics, physiological data interpretation, and context-aware interaction. Key themes include: Human-robot cooperation and trust Emotion recognition and expression Personalized rehabilitation systems AI ethics and human-centered design Publications: Over 150 articles, with recent work exploring humor in HRI, teleoperation trust models, and cross-cultural intelligent vehicles. Notable 2025 contributions include studies on robot laughter efficacy and multimodal facial expression frameworks. Awards: 2025: 4 IROS papers accepted 2016: 25 Women in Robotics recognition 2010: Romanian Academy Award Multiple conference best paper awards (RO-MAN, ICRA, etc.) Advising & Grants: Supervised over 20 PhD students and led projects like EU Horizon 2020 ENRICHME. Current students focus on teleoperation dynamics, robot humor, and haptic interfaces. Active in editorial roles (IJSR, THRI) and conference organization (HRI General Chair 2019). Labs/Teams: Founder of RoboticsByDesign lab and co-initiator of the Hi! Paris interdisciplinary AI center. The SAR lab develops systems for healthcare, education, and human-robot collaboration.
Prof. Roger Wattenhofer is a Full Professor at the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and Deputy head of the Computer Engineering and Networks Lab. He holds a doctorate in Computer Science from ETH Zurich (1998) and has held positions at Brown University and Microsoft Research before returning to ETH. His research focuses on distributed computing, wireless networks, and algorithmic systems design, with contributions to Byzantine agreement protocols, blockchain technologies, and neural network architectures. He teaches courses such as Distributed Systems and Computational Thinking. Education: Ph.D. in Computer Science (ETH Zurich, 1998). Research interests include distributed systems, network algorithms, and the intersection of machine learning with distributed computing. His work spans both theoretical foundations and practical implementations, addressing challenges in fault tolerance, consensus mechanisms, and algorithmic efficiency. Recent publications explore topics like adversarial robustness in voting systems, privacy in reinforcement learning, and generative music models. He actively contributes to open-source frameworks and benchmarks for neural algorithmic reasoning.
Jens Edlund is a Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology's Division of Speech, Music and Hearing. His research focuses on speech technology, dialogue systems, prosody, and evolutionary phonetics. He has contributed to foundational work on speech synthesis, conversational interaction, and multimodal corpora like the D64 corpus. Key projects include the MonAMI Reminder system and analysis of primate vocalizations to understand speech evolution. Edlund has collaborated extensively with global researchers, producing over 150 peer-reviewed works. His work integrates computational methods with linguistic and biological insights, emphasizing human-like dialogue systems and cross-species vocal analysis. Education: Ph.D. in Speech Technology (2011, KTH) Grants: Multiple EU and Swedish Research Council grants for speech technology and interdisciplinary studies Research labs include the KTH Speech, Music and Hearing Lab and collaborations with institutions like Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Current work explores evolutionary origins of speech biomechanics and AI-driven speech synthesis evaluation.
Srijan Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology's College of Computing. His research focuses on data science, AI for security, and online safety, addressing challenges in detecting malicious users, misinformation, and enhancing AI robustness. His work has been deployed in platforms like Flipkart and Wikipedia, and recognized through awards such as the NSF CAREER and Forbes 30 Under 30. Education: B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park Postdoctoral training at Stanford University Research Interests: Multi-modal/multi-lingual detection of harmful content and users Adversarial robustness of AI models Graph and network analysis for early detection Responsible recommender systems Awards & Grants: NSF CAREER Award (2023) Kavli Fellow (2022) Facebook/Adobe Faculty Awards NSF Convergence Accelerator Phase II grant ($5M) Advising & Labs: Leads the CLAWS Lab, advising over 20 students. Active in mentoring through conferences and NSF-funded projects.
Elisa Ricci is a Full Professor at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) at the University of Trento and serves as Head of the Research Unit Deep Visual Learning at Fondazione Bruno Kessler. She coordinates the Doctoral Program in Information Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Trento and holds prestigious fellowships from ELLIS and IAPR. Her research focuses on advancing computer vision and deep learning systems capable of operating in open-world environments. Key interests include domain adaptation, continual learning, and self-supervised learning for visual and multi-modal data processing. Her work addresses critical challenges in enabling machines to adapt to new domains without forgetting prior knowledge, with applications spanning robotics perception, medical imaging, and privacy-preserving AI systems. Recent publications reveal a dominant trend toward leveraging vision-language models for open-vocabulary tasks, training-free adaptation methods, and federated learning architectures. Significant research thrusts include machine unlearning for privacy, robustness against bias in visual classifiers, and novel class discovery using foundation models—particularly evident in 2025 publications addressing medical imaging, 3D segmentation, and collaborative generative systems. Her major recognitions include: ELLIS Fellow IAPR Fellow As Doctoral Program Coordinator at the University of Trento, she oversees PhD training while leading the Deep Visual Learning unit at Fondazione Bruno Kessler. Her research group secures competitive grants in AI-driven perception systems, though specific funding sources aren't detailed in the source material. The Deep Visual Learning Research Unit specializes in open-world computer vision challenges, developing frameworks for domain adaptation, continual learning, and multi-modal perception. Current projects integrate generative models with robotics applications while addressing privacy concerns in vision-language systems through unlearning techniques.
Qianwen Wang is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research combines interactive visualization with interpretable machine learning to foster intuitive, efficient, and reliable Human-AI collaboration. She actively seeks motivated students, research assistants, and interns to join her dynamic research team at UMN CS. Dr. Wang's research focuses on three primary themes: Human-AI Collaboration, where she designs tools to facilitate Human-AI interaction; Automatic & Intelligent Visualization, where she develops techniques to make visualizations accurately interpreted and easily used; and VIS+(X)AI in Biomed/Healthcare, where she studies how visualization and explainable AI can promote scientific discoveries in biomedicine and healthcare. Her work has made significant contributions to visualization, human-computer interaction, and bioinformatics, with particular applications in biomedical knowledge graphs and single-cell omics analysis. Her recent publications demonstrate a strong trend toward integrating visualization with large language models and graph neural networks for biomedical applications. She has published extensively at top venues including IEEE VIS, ACM CHI, and Nature Medicine, with a focus on making AI systems more interpretable and useful for domain experts, particularly in healthcare contexts. Her work often bridges theoretical advances in visualization with practical applications in genomics and healthcare. Two IEEE VIS Honorable Mention Awards (2022, 2024) Best Paper Award from IMLH@ICML 2021 Two Best Abstract Awards from BioVis ISMB (2021, 2022) HDSI Postdoctoral Research Fund Award Research covered by MIT News and Nature Technology Features Dr. Wang actively contributes to the academic community through service roles including General Chair for ISMB BioVis, VisNotes and Poster Chair for IEEE PacificVis, and Program Committee member for IEEE VIS, ACM CHI, and ACM IUI. Her research has been supported by various grants that enable her team to develop innovative visualization techniques and explore their practical applications in biomedical domains. Her research group maintains an active presence in the visualization and HCI communities, with members participating in major conferences and workshops. The lab focuses on creating tools that bridge the gap between complex AI models and human understanding, with particular emphasis on making these technologies accessible and useful for domain experts in biomedical research.
