🏝️Keynote Sessions & Speakers
Prof. Kyu-Jin Cho
South Korea
Kyu-Jin Cho is a Professor and the Director of Soft Robotics Research Center and Biorobotics Lab at Seoul National University. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from MIT and his B.S and M.S. from Seoul National University. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory before joining SNU in 2008. He has been exploring novel soft bio-inspired robot designs, including a water jumping robot, various shape-changing robots, and soft wearable robots for the disabled. He has received the 2014 IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award for his fundamental contributions to soft robotics and biologically inspired robot design. He has published a Science paper on a water jumping robot and several papers in Science Robotics with novel robot designs. He has served RAS as Associate VP of Publication Activities Board, a general chair of RoboSoft 2019, and management committee chair of TMECH. Currently, he serves as VP of the RAS Technical Activities Board and General Chair of ICRA2027.
Dr. Rafael Murrieta-Cid
Mexico
Rafael Murrieta-Cid is a Senior Research Scientist (Investigador Titular D) at the Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas (CIMAT) in Guanajuato, Mexico. He received his B.S. in Physics Engineering from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education, Mexico, and his Ph.D. in vision-based robot navigation from the Institut National Polytechnique, Toulouse, France. He conducted his doctoral research with the Robotics Group at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse. He has held postdoctoral positions at Stanford University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and has completed two sabbaticals, one at UIUC and another at INRIA Université Côte d'Azur. His research interests include robotics, robot motion planning, and control theory. Dr. Murrieta-Cid is a member of Mexico's National System of Researchers, rank 3, and a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. He currently serves as an Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics.
Prof. Toshie Takahashi
Japan
Toshie Takahashi is a Professor at Waseda University, Tokyo. She has been appointed as an Associate Fellow of the CFI, the University of Cambridge. She has held visiting appointments at the University of Oxford, the BKC at Harvard University, and Columbia University. She conducts cross-cultural and trans-disciplinary research on the social impact of robots as well as the potential of AI for Good. She is currently leading two projects on youth and AI. The Goal of both projects is to contribute towards a vision of a future where human happiness takes center stage. The first one is "A Future with AI" project in collaboration with the United Nations. The other project is the Moonshot R&D program by leading the Gen ZAI project, engaging youths now for a global AI future. Finally, Takahashi sits on the advisory committee of the Information and Communication Council, Ministry of the Internal Affairs and Communications, Japan.
Prof. Vicente Parra Vega
Mexico
Vicente Parra Vega earned two simultaneous degrees, graduating a semester early, from the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (UANL) in 1987, and completed a Master's degree in Automatic Control at CINVESTAV in 1989. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in 1995 from the Department of Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics at the University of Tokyo. His postdoctoral research was conducted at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics in 2000, followed by a sabbatical in 2010 at the Laboratory for Intelligent Robotics Systems at the University of Texas. He has authored over 300 peer-reviewed publications, including 82 articles in indexed journals and 8 book chapters. Much of this work is based on the original contributions of the 15 Ph.D. and 49 Master's theses he has supervised, many with the students as first authors. His research focuses on robotics and mechatronics, with a particular interest in the modeling and control of nonlinear, uncertain, and perturbed dynamic systems. Since 1990, he has been affiliated with CINVESTAV, where he is currently part of the Department of Robotics and Advanced Manufacturing, a division he co-founded in 2006. He also leads the Laboratory of Emerging Robotic Systems.
Prof. Katja Mombaur
Germany
Katja Mombaur is a Full Professor at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, where she holds the Chair for Optimization & Biomechanics for Human-Centred Robotics and directs the BioRobotics Lab. In addition, she holds an affiliation with the University of Waterloo in Canada, where she has been a Full Professor and Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) for Human-Centred Robotics & Machine Intelligence since 2020. Prior to moving to Canada, she was a Full Professor at Heidelberg University, where she directed the Optimization, Robotics & Biomechanics Chair, as well as the Heidelberg Center for Motion Research. Her international experience includes two years as a visiting researcher at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse and a Postdoc at Seoul National University. She studied Aerospace Engineering at the University of Stuttgart and SupAéro in Toulouse and holds a PhD in Mathematics from Heidelberg University. Katja Mombaur currently serves as the Vice President for Member Activities of the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society and as Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and has actively contributed to the organization of many conferences and workshops. She is the KIT Spokesperson of the Helmholtz Graduate School of Information and Data Science for Health (HIDSS4Health). Katja's research focuses on understanding human movement by a combined approach of model-based optimization, learning, and experiments, and using this knowledge to improve motions of humanoid robots and the interactions of humans with exoskeletons, prostheses, and external physical devices. Her goal is to endow humanoid and wearable robots with motion intelligence that allows them to operate safely in a complex human world. The development of efficient algorithms for motion generation, control, and learning is a core component of her research.
Prof. Ryo Kurazume
Japan
Ryo Kurazume received his Ph.D. from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1998. He is currently a Professor and Vice Dean at the Graduate School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering, Kyushu University. He was a director of the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ), a director of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE), and a chairman of the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers (JSME) Robotics and Mechatronics Division. He received JSME Robotics and Mechatronics Academic Achievement Award, SICE System Integration Division Academic Achievement Award, and JSME Robotics and Mechatronics Division Robotics and Mechatronics Award. He is RSJ Fellow, JSME Fellow, SICE Fellow, and a Senior Member of IEEE.