Davide Scaramuzza is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at the University of Zurich. He did his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich, a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, and was a visiting professor at Stanford University. His research focuses on autonomous, agile navigation of mini drones using standard and event-based cameras. He pioneered autonomous, vision-based navigation of drones, which inspired the navigation algorithm of the NASA Mars helicopter and many drone companies. In 2022, his team demonstrated that an AI-powered drone could outperform the world champions of drone racing, a result published in Nature and featured on the magazine’s cover. His result marks the first time an AI defeated a human in the physical world.

For his research contributions, he has won many awards, including the very recent IEEE Technical Field Award, which he will receive at the ICRA 2024 conference in Japan, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, a European Research Council Consolidator Grant, and many paper awards, including the IROS 2023 Best Paper Award, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and the IEEE Transactions on Robotics best paper awards. Davide contributed significantly to visual-inertial state estimation, vision-based agile navigation of microdrones, and low-latency, robust perception with event cameras.

His results have been transferred to many products, from drones to automobiles, cameras, AR/VR headsets, and mobile devices. Davide counts several entrepreneurial achievements: In 2015, he co-founded Zurich-Eye, which became Facebook-Meta Zurich, and developed the world-leading virtual-reality headset Meta Quest. In 2020, he co-founded SUIND, which builds autonomous drones for precision agriculture. Davide has been consulting the United Nations on disaster response, the Fukushima Action Plan, disarmament, and AI for good. Many aspects of his research have been featured in the media, such as The New York Times, The Economist, and Forbes.

Guido de Croon: Received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Maastricht University, the Netherlands. Currently, he is Full Professor at TU Delft and scientific lead of the Micro Air Vehicle lab (MAVLab) of Delft University of Technology. His research interest lies with computationally efficient, bio-inspired algorithms for autonomous, light-weight flying robots, with an emphasis on computer vision. His work has included fully autonomous flight of the 20-gram flapping wing drone "DelFly Explorer" and a swarm of tiny, 30-gram nano-copters able to explore unknown environments and localize gas leaks.

Moreover, his group has made several advances in energy-efficient, low-latency neuromorphic sensing and processing for autonomous drones. Finally, his work has generated various new hypotheses on biological intelligence, including how honeybees actively evaluate distances with optical flow and how flying insects can estimate their flight attitude without using accelerometers.

Giuseppe Loianno is currently an Associate Professor at the New York University, New York, NY, USA, and the Director of the Agile Robotics and Perception Lab working on autonomous robots. Prior to joining NYU, he was a Research Scientist and Team Leader with GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. He has authored or coauthored more than 70 conference papers, journal papers, and book chapters. His research interests include perception, learning, and control for autonomous robots. Dr. Loianno is recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award, the IROS Toshio Fukuda Young Professional Award in 2022, Conference Editorial Board Best Associate Editor Award at ICRA 2022, and Best Reviewer Award at ICRA 2016.

He is senior editor for IROS 2023-2025 and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters as well as an associate editor for multiple other robotics journals including IEEE Transactions on Robotics, International Journal of Robotics Research, Field Robotics, and Frontiers in Robotics and AI. He is chair of the IEEE RAS Robotics Foundations cluster and the IEEE RAS TC on Aerial Robotics and Unmanned Aerial Systems. He was the General Chair of the IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR) in 2021 as well as Program Chair in 2019, 2020, and 2022. His work has been featured in a large number of renowned international news and magazines such as IEEE Spectrum, Popular Science, Scientific American, TechCrunch, MIT Technological Review, and Quartz.

Auke Ijspeert is a professor at EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland), IEEE Fellow, and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory (www.epfl.ch/labs/biorob). He has a B.Sc./M.Sc. in physics from the EPFL (1995), and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1999). His research interests are at the intersection between robotics and computational neuroscience. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to gain a better understanding of animal locomotion and movement control, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and locomotion controllers (see for instance Ijspeert et al, Science, Vol. 315, 2007 and Ijspeert, Science Vol. 346, 2014).

He is also interested in assisting persons with limited mobility using exoskeletons and assistive furniture. With his colleagues, he has received paper awards at ICRA2002, CLAWAR2005, IEEE Humanoids 2007, IEEE ROMAN 2014, CLAWAR 2015, CLAWAR 2019, and ICRA2024. He is associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics. He is also a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine.

Barbara Mazzolai is Associate Director for Robotics and Director of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Laboratory at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). From February 2011 to March 2021 she was the Director of the IIT Center for Micro-BioRobotics (CMBR) in Pontedera. From July 2012 to 2017, she also covered the role of Deputy Director for the Supervision and Organization of the IIT Centers Network.

Her research activities are in the areas of biologically-inspired robotics and soft robotics. In this context, she is the pioneer of the fields of plant-inspired robots and growing robots. She graduated in Biology at the University of Pisa (Italy) in 1995, obtained an International Master Diploma in Eco-Management in 1998 at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna (SSSA), and in 2011 the Ph.D. in Microsystems Engineering from the University of Rome Tor Vergata. In the years 1999-2009, she was Research Assistant and then Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the SSSA Center for Research in Microengineering (CRIM Lab, now the BioRobotics Institute). In November 2009, she joined IIT at the Center for Micro-BioRobotics (CMBR) as Team Leader, and then from 2011 to 2021 she was the Director CMBR. In 2013, she started her research line on Bioinspired Soft Robotics as Principal Investigator.

She is member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (Tübingen and Stuttgart, Germany), since 2016; and member of the Advisory Committee of the Cluster on Living Adaptive and Energy-autonomous Materials Systems - livMatS (Freiburg, Germany), since 2019. She is Member of the International Research and Innovation Advisory Board (IRIAB) of the Università Campus Bio-Medico dì Roma (UCBM) since 2022.

In 2017, from January to July, she was at Imperial College London (UK) as Visiting Faculty of the Aerial Robotics Lab. In 2020, she has obtained the Italian National Scientific Qualification of Full Professor in Bioengineering.

She has a long experience as researcher and project manager of European projects in the topics of biorobotics, soft robotics and environmental robotics, including OCTOPUS (FP7-231608), HydroNet (FP7-212790), DustBot (FP6-045299), EMECAP (QLK4-CT-2000-00489), and of the SeedBot ESA-ARIADNA Project. From 2012 to 2015 she was the Coordinator of the EU-funded FET-Open PLANTOID project (FP7-293431), for the design of innovative artefacts inspired by plant roots sensing, actuation, and intelligence for environmental exploration and monitoring. She developed the world-first plant-inspired robot, “Plantoid”. Since January 2019, she is the Coordinator of the EU-funded FET-Proactive GrowBot Project (www.growbot.eu/), which proposes a disruptively new paradigm of movement in robotics inspired by the moving-by-growing abilities of climbing plants, and aims at developing a new generation of plant-inspired self-growing robots. Since January 2020, she is a National Geographic Explorer with the grant “RoKER - Roots of Knowledge with Environmental Robots”.

Since January 2021, Dr. Mazzolai is coordinator of the EU H2020 FET Environmental Intelligence project "I-Seed" (www.iseedproject.eu/), which aims at developing self-deployable and biodegradable soft miniaturized robots, inspired by the morphology and dispersion abilities of plant seeds, to perform an environmentally responsible in-situ detection of key environmental parameters in air and topsoil. Since May 2021, she is Principal Investigator of the European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant “I-Wood” (iwoodproject.eu/), which proposes a new paradigm of virtual and physical robotic networks inspired by the belowground fungus-mediated inter-plant communication, known as the "Wood Wide Web", and by the associated collective behaviours

She is author and co-author of more than 270 papers appeared in international journals, books, and conference proceedings. She has published some popular science books for adults and children, such as “La Natura Geniale” (2019) and "Il futuro raccontato dalle piante" (2021) with Longanesi Ed.; "Perché i robot sono stupidi e altre domande sulla tecnologia", with Federico Taddia (2021) and "L'incredibile Plantoide e i superpoteri del regno vegetale" with Chiara Valentina Segré (2022) (Editoriale Scienza).

Invited as speaker at national and international scientific events, Dr. Mazzolai periodically organizes workshops and special sessions on the topics of soft robotics, bioinspired robotics, plant-inspired growing robots at major conferences for the scientific community and general public. She is member of the Executive Advisory Board of Advanced Intelligent Systems; member of the Editorial Board of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, Soft Robotics, Biomimetics, Robotics & Automation Letters; member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Advanced Materials Technologies; and Associated Editor for IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, Frontiers in Bionics and Biomimetics, and Frontiers in Robotics and AI - Soft Robotics.

In 2022, she was the General Co-Chair of the IEEE RoboSoft Conference. She served as Associated Editor for ICRA 2016-2020, IEEE RA-L 2016-2020, IROS 2013, 2017, 2020, as Interdisciplinary Program Co-Chair for RoboSoft 2018-2019, Government Forum Co-Chair for IROS 2016, Publicity Co-Chair for BIOROB 2012, workshop Co-Chair for I-RIM 2019 and for RoboSoft 2020. She is member of the IEEE, of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), of the Materials Research Society (MRS) and of the Italian Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines (I-RIM).

Barbara Caputo is Full Professor at the Polytechnic of Turin, where she directs the university's Artificial Intelligence Hub (AI-H@PoliTo). She received her PhD in Computer Science from Stockholm Polytechnic (KTH), Sweden in 2005. She is a co-founder of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems Society and an ELLIS fellow (www.ellis.eu), led the National Doctorate on AI & Industry 4.0 and is the Rector's Contact on Artificial Intelligence.

She is part of the 30 experts who developed the Italian National Strategy on AI 2022-2024. She was the first italian researcher to win an ERC award in the field of artificial vision. She appeared on the ‘Mickey Mouse’ Magazine with her alter-ego 'Barb Quackut' in 2020; in 2021 she received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark for his contributions to the field of AI applied to computer vision and robotics. In 2023 she co-founded the startup FoccosAI.

Mérouane Debbah is Professor at Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi. He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay, France. He was with Motorola Labs, Saclay, France, from 1999 to 2002, and then with the Vienna Research Center for Telecommunications, Vienna, Austria, until 2003. From 2003 to 2007, he was an Assistant Professor with the Mobile Communications Department, Institut Eurecom, Sophia Antipolis, France. Since 2007, he is Full Professor at CentraleSupelec, Gif-sur-Yvette, France. From 2007 to 2014, he was the Director of the Alcatel-Lucent Chair on Flexible Radio. From 2014 to 2021, he was Vice-President of the Huawei France Research Center. He was jointly the director of the Mathematical and Algorithmic Sciences Lab as well as the director of the Lagrange Mathematical and Computing Research Center.

From 2021 to 2023, he was Chief Researcher at the Technology Innovation Institute and leading the AI & Digital Science Research centers at the Technology Innovation Institute. He was also Adjunct Professor with the Department of Machine Learning at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence in Abu Dhabi. Since 2023, he is a Professor at Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi and founding director of the 6G center. He has managed 8 EU projects and more than 24 national and international projects. His research interests lie in fundamental mathematics, algorithms, statistics, information, and communication sciences research. He holds more than 50 patents. He is an IEEE Fellow, a WWRF Fellow, a Eurasip Fellow, an AAIA Fellow, an Institut Louis Bachelier Fellow and a Membre émérite SEE.

He was a recipient of the ERC Grant MORE (Advanced Mathematical Tools for Complex Network Engineering) from 2012 to 2017. He was a recipient of the Mario Boella Award in 2005, the IEEE Glavieux Prize Award in 2011, the Qualcomm Innovation Prize Award in 2012, the 2019 IEEE Radio Communications Committee Technical Recognition Award and the 2020 SEE Blondel Medal. He received more than 40 best paper awards, among which the 2007 IEEE GLOBECOM Best Paper Award, the Wi-Opt 2009 Best Paper Award, the 2010 Newcom++ Best Paper Award, the WUN CogCom Best Paper 2012 and 2013 Award, the 2014 WCNC Best Paper Award, the 2015 ICC Best Paper Award, the 2015 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize, the 2015 IEEE Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize, the 2016 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award, the 2016 European Wireless Best Paper Award, the 2017 Eurasip Best Paper Award, the 2018 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award, the 2019 IEEE Communications Society Young Author Best Paper Award, the 2021 Eurasip Best Paper Award, the 2021 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award, the 2022 IEEE Communications Society Outstanding Paper Award, the 2022 ICC Best paper Award, the 2022 IEEE GLOBECOM Best Paper Award, 2022 IEEE TAOS TC Best GCSN Paper Award, the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Metaverse Best Paper Award, the 2023 IEEE Communications Society Fred W. Ellersick Prize, the 2023 ICC best paper award, the 2023 Best ICEAA-IEEE APWC Paper Award, the 2023 IEEE ICCT Best Paper Award, the 2023 IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication, the 2024 IEEE ICC Best Paper Award, the 2024 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize, the 2024 IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award as well as the Valuetools 2007, Valuetools 2008, CrownCom 2009, Valuetools 2012, SAM 2014, and 2017 IEEE Sweden VT-COM-IT Joint Chapter best student paper awards.

He is an Associate Editor-in-Chief of the journal Random Matrix: Theory and Applications. He was an Associate Area Editor and Senior Area Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SIGNAL PROCESSING from 2011 to 2013 and from 2013 to 2014, respectively. From 2021 to 2022, he served as an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Industry Speaker. He is a member of the Marconi Prize Selection Advisory Committee.

Prof. C.A. Monje has been working in robotics and control for over 20 years. Her work on soft robotics and systems control is internationally recognized. She has actively collaborated with research centers in the United States, France, Germany, Italy, and Singapore, and leads several projects on the development of assistive robots.

As the Principal Investigator (PI) of the Soft Robotics Laboratory of the UC3M RoboticsLab, with a strong expertise in soft robots prototyping, modeling and control (both model-based and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques), she has been advisor of 12 PhD Thesis (7 finished (International Mention), 5 ongoing) and 100+ Final Master and Degree Thesis (18+ years of teaching activity with 30+ recognitions for her teaching quality). This activity has been recognized with the Best PhD Thesis in Engineering Award by SENER Foundation (2021) and the Best Final Master Thesis Accesit Award by COIIM (2020).

She has been involved as PI and research member in numerous European, national, regional and with companies projects. She has published more than 150 research papers in high impact journals and conferences on control, robotics and AI, with 7000+ cites, h-index 27. She has been acknowledged by ANECA with 4 six-year research/transfer terms. She has also received the Best Paper – Control Engineering Practice – Award (2008) and the Best Paper – International Journal of Humanoid Robotics – Award (2020).

She has been member of Organizing Committees of relevant international conferences (IROS 2018, HUMANOIDS 2014, SAFC 2007, IFAC FDA 2004), Workshops Organizer in international conferences (Robosoft 2023, IROS 2018-2021, CLAWAR 2016, Robocity 2015-2016, etc), Editorial Board in international journals (Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (EAAI), ISA Transactions, Frontiers in Robotics and AI, IJMERR, Robotics, IJARS, IJHR), Senior and Associate Editor in international conferences (ICRA 2021-2023, IROS 2018-2020, CLAWAR 2017-2022, Humanoids 2014, CCDC 2008-2022), and member of Scientific and Technical Program Committees (IFAC TC 2.5 on Robust Control 2012-2021, IFAC TC 4.3 on Robotics 2012-2021, Symposium on Fractional Signals and Systems 2017, IEEE ASME MESA 2007-2011, IEEE ICMA 2007, etc).

She has performed as reviewer for more than 30 international journals and conferences of relevance (ISA Transactions, IEEE Transactions on Education, IET Control Theory and Applications, Journal of Dynamic Systems, IROS, CLAWAR, ICRA, HUMANOIDS, ICAR, etc). She has been invited speaker in relevant international conferences and meetings (Robosoft, IROS, ICRA, Embodied Intelligence Conference, ECC, HUMANOIDS, TEDx talks, Biorobotics Institute of Pisa, DLR, CSOIS, etc).

She is Expert Evaluator of the European Commission for Horizon Europe Program (2017-2024) and National Research Evaluator of the Spanish Ministry of Competitiveness and Industry (2017-2024). She is the Director of the Center for Aeronautical Training and Services of the UC3M (CATS-UC3M) (2012-2024), member of the Advising Committee of the RPAS Excelence Center (AESA) (2017-2023), and Deputy Director of Promotion and Dissemination of the UC3M School of Engineering (since 2020), with 100+ collaborations with relevant media. She is the Coordinator of the Strategic Line in AI of the Comité Español de Automática (CEA) and is also member of several international and national networks (EuRobotics, RoboSoft, HispaRob). She was the Secretary of the Systems Engineering and Automation Department of the UC3M (2011-2015).

Other awards and recognitions: Member of the Jury of the “Princesa de Asturias” Award (2020-2023), “TALGO Excelencia Profesional de la Mujer en Ingeniería” Award (finalist) (2022, 2023), “Top 100 Mujeres Líderes en España, Categoría Investigadoras” Award (2020), “Gigante Extremeño” Award (2019); “Ada Byron a la Mujer Tecnóloga de la Universidad de Deusto” Award (2019); “Excelencia Investigadora de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid” Award (2018); “Mujer y Tecnología de la Fundación Orange” Award (2018); “Mejor Científica Contemporánea – QUO-CSIC” Award (2017); European Doctorate Distinction and Doctorate Extraordinary Award (2006).

Jianwei Zhang is Professor and Director of Technical Aspects of Multimodal Systems, Department of Informatics, Universität Hamburg. He is member of German Academy of Science and Engineering, International Member of Chinese Academy of Engineering, and member of Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Hamburg. He received both his Bachelor of Engineering (1986, with distinction) and Master of Engineering (1989) in the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, his PhD (1994) in the Institute of Real-Time Computer Systems and Robotics of Department of Computer Science of Universität Karlsruhe, Habilitation (2001, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics) of Technical Faculty of Universität Bielefeld, and in 2002 became full-professor of Department of Informatics of Universität Hamburg.

Jianwei Zhang´s research interests include multimodal information (visual, auditory, tactile, etc.) processing, cognitive sensor fusion for robot perception, multimodal human-robot interaction, experience-based robot learning, bio-inspired modelling and learning of sensory-motor adaptive control, robot dexterous manipulation, human-like dynamically controlled robots, Robot Operating System (ROS), 3D robot vision, mobile manipulation service robots, bi-manual robot assembly of 3D aggregates, and medical robot systems, etc. In these areas, he has published in total over 500 journal、conference papers and books, and received multiple best paper awards of numerous international conferences.

Many of the R&D results have been applied in civil practices with real-world impact. He has led several large-scale EU、 BMBF、DFG projects on intelligent robotics and assistive service systems. He is the General Chair of IEEE MFI (Multisensor Fusion and Integration) 2012, the General Chair of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems IROS 2015, and currently CAB A-VP of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

Dr. Yukie Nagai has been investigating underlying neural mechanisms for social cognitive development by means of computational approaches. She designs neural network models for robots to learn to acquire cognitive functions such as self-other cognition, estimation of others’ intention and emotion, altruism, and so on based on the theory of predictive coding. The simulator reproducing atypical perception in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which has been developed by her group, greatly impacts society as it enables people with and without ASD to better understand potential causes for social difficulties.

She was elected to “30 women in robotics you need to know about” in 2019, “World’s 50 Most Renowned Women in Robotics” in 2020, and “35 Women in Robotics Engineering and Science” in 2022. She serves as the principal investigator of JST CREST “Cognitive Mirroring” and CREST “Cognitive Feeling” since December 2016 and October 2021, respectively.

Pedro U. Lima (Ph.D., Full Professor) received the Licenciatura (5 years) and M.Sc degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from IST in 1984 and 1989, respectively, and the Ph.D. (1994) in Electrical Engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY, USA. Currently, he is a Full Professor at IST, Universidade de Lisboa, and the President of the Institute for Systems and Robotics. He is the co-author of two books, and Associate Editor of the Elsevier’s Robotics and Autonomous Systems. His research interests lie in the areas of discrete event models and supervision of robot tasks and planning under uncertainty, with applications to multirobot systems. He has (co-)supervised successfully 21 PhD students, and currently (co-)supervises another 4 PhD students.

Pedro Lima was President and founding member of the Portuguese Robotics Society, was National Delegate to EU and ESA Space Robotics programs and was awarded a 6-month Chair of Excellence at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain in 2010. Pedro is very active in robot competitions, and he is a Trustee and currently Vice-President of the RoboCup Federation. He was also General Chair of RoboCup2004, held in Lisbon, and the Coordinator of the FP7 Coordination Action RoCKIn, the first R&D project on robot competitions funded by the European Commission. He was also the IST leader of the Iberian Robotics team (together with U. Seville and CATEC) winner of Challenge 3 of MBZIRC 2020.

Dr. Timothy Chung joined Microsoft as General Manager for Autonomy and Robotics within the Strategic Missions and Technologies division, which focuses on next-generation technology solutions for government and commercial applications. Prior to joining Microsoft, Dr. Chung served as a program manager at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Tactical Technology Office, where he led the OFFensive Swarm-Enabled Tactics program and the DARPA Subterranean (SubT) Challenge.

Previously, Dr. Chung served as an Assistant Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School and Director of the Advanced Robotic Systems Engineering Laboratory (ARSENL). Dr. Chung holds a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Cornell University. He also earned Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

Lakmal Seneviratne is Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the founding Director of the Centre for Autonomous Robotic Systems (KUCARS) at Khalifa University, UAE. He has also served as Associate Provost for Research and Graduate Studies and Associate VP Research at Khalifa University. Prior to joining Khalifa University he was Professor of Mechatronics, the founding Director of the Centre for Robotics Research and the Head of the Division of Engineering, at King’s College London.

He is Professor Emeritus at King’s College London. His main research interests are centred on robotics and automation, with particular emphasis on increasing the autonomy of robotic systems interacting with complex dynamic environments. He has published over 400 peer reviewed publications on these topics. He is a member of the Mohammed Bin Rashid Academy of Scientists in the UAE.