Speakers

Invited Speakers

Alphabetical order on surname.

Moritz Bächer (Disney Research, Switzerland)

Moritz Bächer is the Associate Lab Director of Disney Research at Walt Disney Imagineering, where he leads a strategic program focusing on the development of novel model- and learning-based tools for the design and control of believable robotic characters. His core expertise is the optimal design and control of both soft and rigid systems, using a combination of differentiable simulation and reinforcement learning. Prior to joining Disney, he received his Ph.D. from the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and his master’s degree from ETH Zurich.

Sungjoon Choi (Korea University, Korea)

Sungjoon Choi is presently an assistant professor at Korea University in the Department of Artificial Intelligence. He received Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Seoul National University (2018) and a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Seoul National University (2012). Dr. Choi was a postdoc at Disney Research Los Angeles, focussing on applying machine learning methods in robotics. Before joining Disney Research, he was a research scientist at Kakao Brain in Korea. His research interests include sample-efficient reinforcement learning and human-robot interaction, and received Best Conference Paper Finalist Award at the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

Libin Liu (Peking University, China)

Dr. Libin Liu is an Assistant Professor at Peking University. Before joining Peking University, he was the Chief Scientist of DeepMotion Inc. and was a postdoc researcher at Disney Research and the University of British Columbia. Dr. Liu received his Ph.D. degree in computer science from Tsinghua University. His research interests include physics-based simulation, character animation, motion control, and broader areas such as reinforcement learning and deep learning. He served on the program committees of all the major computer graphics conferences, including ACM SIGGRAPH (North America/Asia), Pacific Graphics, ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, etc.

Michiel van de Panne (University of British Columbia, Canada)

Michiel van de Panne‘s research interests are in deep reinforcement learning, physics-based animation of human and animal motion, learning for motor control, motion planning, robotics, and computer graphics. He is a co-founder of the ACM/Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation, the leading forum focused on computer animation and simulation research. He was awarded the 2022 ACMSIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award, the 2016 CHCCS Achievement Award for his contributions to computer graphics, and held a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair during 2002-2011. He currently serves as the deputy director of CAIDA, which is UBC's main AI organization. He cofounded Motion Playground, the developer of the Ski Stunt Simulator game, one of the earliest games to be fully designed around physics-based game play. His students and postdocs have (co)founded companies including Anomotion, VGC Software, Element AI, and Waverly; have assumed key roles at Tesla (director of AI and Autopilot vision), DeepMotion, and Electronic Arts, and nine are university faculty. He is a full professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Prior to moving to UBC, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto

Daniele Pucci (Italiano di Technologia, Italy)

Daniele received the bachelor and master degrees in Control Engineering with highest honors from ”Sapienza”, University of Rome, in 2007 and 2009, respectively. In 2013, he earned the PhD title with a thesis prepared at INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France, with the supervision of Tarek Hamel, Salvatore Monaco, and Claude Samson. From 2013 to 2017, he has been a postdoc at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) working within the EU project CoDyCo focusing on the balancing problem of the iCub humanoid robot. From August 2017 to August 2021, he has been the head of the Dynamic Interaction Control lab, a group of about 20 members focusing on the iCub locomotion walking problem. In this period, Daniele also laid the basis for the "Aerial Humanoid Robotics", a new branch of Robotics whose main aim is to achieve flying humanoid robots. Daniele has also been the scientific PI of the H2020 European Project AnDy, and now is: task leader of the H2020 European Project SoftManBot, coordinator of the joint laboratory between IIT and Honda JP, principal investigator (PI) in the Camozzi-IIT and Danieli Automation-IIT joint labs. Lastly, Daniele is the coordinator of the ergoCub project, a 5 million, three year joint project between INAIL and IIT. Since September 2021, Daniele is the PI leading the Artificial and Mechanical Intelligence research line at IIT, a team composed of about forty members that combines AI and Mechanics to devise the next generation of the iCub humanoid robot.

Eiichi Yoshida (Tokyo University of Science, Japan)

Eiichi Yoshida received M.E and Ph. D degrees on Precision Machinery Engineering from Graduate School of Engineering, the University of Tokyo in 1996. He then joined former Mechanical Engineering Laboratory, later in 2001 reorganized as National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Tsukuba, Japan. He served as Co-Director of AIST-CNRS JRL (Joint Robotics Laboratory) at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France, from 2004 to 2008, and at AIST, Tsukuba, Japan from 2009 to 2021. He was also Deputy Director of Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems Research Center, and TICO-AIST Cooperative Research Laboratory for Advanced Logistics in AIST from 2020 to 2021. In 2022 he moved to Tokyo University of Science (TUS), and is currently Professor at Department of Medical and Robotic Engineering Design, Faculty of Advanced Engineering of TUS. He is IEEE Fellow, and member of RSJ, SICE and JSME. He has published more than 200 scientific papers in journals and peer-reviewed international conferences and co-edited some books. He received several awards including Best Paper Award in Advance Robotics Journal and the honor of Chevalier l’Ordre National du Mérite from French Government. His research interests include robot task and motion planning, human modeling, humanoid robotics and advanced logistics technology.