Invited Speakers
The following list of invited speakers is given in alphabetical order.
Abhinav Valada is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Robot Learning Lab at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He is a member of the Department of Computer Science, principal investigator at the BrainLinks-BrainTools Center, and founding faculty of the ELLIS Unit Freiburg. He received his Ph.D. "summa cum laude" from the University of Freiburg and M.S. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. He co-founded and served as the Director of Operations of Platypus LLC, a company developing autonomous robotic boats, and has previously worked at the National Robotics Engineering Center and the Field Robotics Center of Carnegie Mellon University. Abhinav Valada is an ELLIS Scholar, DFG Emmy Noether AI Fellow, and co-chair of the IEEE RAS TC Robot Learning. He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, and IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. He regularly serves as an Area Chair and in the Program Committees of several well-known conferences in machine learning and robotics.
Andrew Davison holds the position of Professor of Robot Vision at the Department of Computing, Imperial College London, and leads the Dyson Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College where they are working on vision and AI technology for next generation home robotics. He also leads the Robot Vision Research Group though most of his activity is now within the Dyson Lab. He pioneered SLAM with vision from the mid 1990s onwards, and brought the SLAM acronym and methods from robotics to single camera computer vision with the breakthrough MonoSLAM algorithm in 2003 which enabled long-term, drift-free, real-time SLAM from a single camera for the first time, inspiring many researchers and industry developments in robotics and inside-out tracking for VR and AR.
Henning Lategahn is the founder and CEO of atlatec. The company is focusing of the development of 3D mapping technologies for autonomous driving. In 2022 altlatec was acquired by Bosch, where Henning now serves as department lead for autonomous driving maps. Henning was studying computer sciences in Aachen, Germany and Yväskylä, Finland. In 2013 he obtained his PhD from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) were he was conducting research on mapping and localization for autonomous driving. Between 2013 and 2014 Henning was working as a research associate at KIT.
Philipp Krähenbühl is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University and then spent two years as a Postdoc at UC Berkeley. His research interests lie in Computer Vision, Machine learning and Computer Graphics. He is particularly interested in deep learning, as well as image segmentation and understanding.
Yuning Chai is the head of AI Research at Cruise LLC, an autonomous driving car company based in San Francisco. He leads a research team working on areas across the entire autonomous driving stack: from perception to prediction, planning, simulation, and mapping. Before joining Cruise, Chai worked at Waymo, where he led the Open Dataset effort and published new approaches to problems such as 3D detection, motion forecasting, and sensor simulation. Chai holds a PhD from University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Andrew Zisserman and Prof. Victor Lempitksy. He also has MSc and BSc degrees from ETH Zurich.