Steven Dubowsky
Steven Dubowsky received his Bachelor's degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, New York, and his M.S. and Sc.D. degrees from Columbia University. He is currently in both the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at M.I.T and Director of the Mechanical Engineering Field and Space Robotics Laboratory. He has been a Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, a Visiting Professor at Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, and Visiting Professor at the California Institute of Technology.
Dr. Dubowsky's research has included the development of modeling techniques for manipulator flexibility and the development of optimal and self-learning adaptive control procedures for rigid and flexible robotic manipulators. He has authored or co-authored nearly 300 papers in the area of the dynamics, control and design of high performance electromechanical and optical systems. His current research includes fuel cell power for mobile systems and photovoltaic-powered clean water systems for challenging field environments.
Gary Bradsky
Dr. Gary Rost Bradski holds a joint appointment as Consulting Professor in Stanford University's Computer Sciences Department where he teaches a course in Robot Perception. He has 69 publications and 32 patents.
Dr. Bradski founded and directs the Open Source Computer Vision Library (OpenCV), now a non-profit foundation, that is used globally in research, government and commercial applications with over 5M downloads to date. He led the computer vision team for Stanley, the Stanford robot that won the $2M DARPA Grand Challenge and more recently he helped in the founding of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project under the leadership of Professor Andrew Ng. Dr. Bradski published a book for O'Reilly Press: Learning OpenCV: Computer Vision with the OpenCV Library which has been the best selling text in computer vision and machine learning for 3 years now.
Yiannis Demiris
Yiannis Demiris is a Reader (Associate Professor) in intelligent and assistive robotics at the department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London, where he heads the Personal Robotics laboratory. He does research on human-robot interaction, humanoid & assistive robotics, and multi-robot systems, with a particular Emphasis on the mechanisms of development and learning.
He has organize several international conferences, including the IEEE conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-2007) as chair and the ACM/IEEE conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI-2008) as program chair. He has edited three books on robot learning and guest edited special journal issues of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (Part-B) on Robot Learning by Demonstration and Imitation, and the journal of Adaptive Behaviour on developmental robotics.
He is participating in two European FP7 projects, ALIZ-E (Adaptive Strategies for Sustainable Long-Term interaction) and EFAA (Experimental Functional Android Assistant), while collaborating in industrial research projects with BAE Systems, and IBM.
Giorgio Metta
Giorgio Metta is Senior Researcher at IIT and director of the iCub Facility. He is also Deputy Director at IIT, delegate to the international relations of the institute. Giorgio Metta is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the University of Plymouth. He was one of the coordinators of the FP6 IST 004370 RobotCub project which resulted in the design of the iCub humanoid robot. The iCub is an open source platform now adopted in more than 20 laboratories worldwide. Giorgio Metta has been active in the field of Cognitive Robotics for the past 15 years resulting in about 200 peer-reviewed publications. His main interests are at the intersection of robotics and neuroscience, in particular, with regards to the development of sensorimotor coordination. He has been principal investigator in about a dozen of EU projects.