2024 Speakers

  • Peter Corke

    Queensland University of Technology

    Peter Corke is a robotics researcher and educator. He is a Distinguished Professor  at Queensland University of Technology and Director of the QUT Centre for Robotics. He was also the Director of the ARC Centre for Robotic Vision between 2014 – 2021. His research is concerned with enabling robots to see, and the application of robots to mining, agriculture and environmental monitoring. He created widely used open-source software for teaching and research, wrote the best selling textbook “Robotics, Vision, and Control”, created several MOOCs and the Robot Academy, and has won national and international recognition for teaching including 2017 Australian University Teacher of the Year. He is a fellow of the IEEE, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, the Australian Academy of Science; former editor-in-chief of the IEEE Robotics & Automation magazine; founding editor of the Journal of Field Robotics; founding multi-media editor and executive editorial board member of the International Journal of Robotics Research; member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts on Advanced Robotics series; recipient of the Qantas/Rolls-Royce and Australian Engineering Excellence awards; and has held visiting positions at Oxford, University of Illinois, Carnegie-Mellon University and University of Pennsylvania. He received his undergraduate and masters degrees in electrical engineering and PhD from the University of Melbourne.

  • Dana Kulic

    Monash University

    Professor Dana Kulić develops autonomous systems that can operate in concert with humans, using natural and intuitive interaction strategies while learning from user feedback to improve and individualise operation over long-term use. In collaboration with Professor Elizabeth Croft, she pioneered systems to quantify and control safety during HRI based on both robot and human perception. Working with Professor Yoshihiko Nakamura at the University of Tokyo, she developed one of the first systems to implement continuous learning from demonstration. The system was a first step towards robots that can learn from non-experts, as it did not require the demonstrator to segment or scaffold their demonstration. Her research in rehabilitation technology enables highly accurate, non-invasive, measurement of human movement, which can be deployed in industrial settings for accurate measurement of operator movement. She serves as the Global Innovation Research Visiting Professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and the August-Wilhelm Scheer Visiting Professor at the Technical University of Munich. Before coming to Monash, Professor. Kulić established the Adaptive Systems Lab at the University of Waterloo, and collaborated with colleagues to establish Waterloo as one of Canada’s leading research centres in robotics. She is a co-Investigator of the Waterloo Robohub, the largest robotics experimental facility in Canada, and a co-Principal Investigator of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Canadian Robotics Network, Canada’s only federally funded network in robotics. She has led a number of large research projects and collaborations with industry and user groups, including a strategic project grant in collaborative assembly and multiple grants developing automation for rehabilitation.

  • Simon Lucey

    University of Adelaide

    Simon Lucey (Ph.D.) is a professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide, where he is the Director of the Australian Institute of Machine Learning (AIML). Prior to this he was an associate research professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute (RI) in Pittsburgh USA. From 2017-2020, he was a principal scientist at the autonomous vehicle company Argo AI and spent time at the CSIRO (2009-2014). He has received various career awards including an ARC Future Fellowship (2009-2013). Simon’s research interests span computer vision, machine learning, and robotics. He enjoys drawing inspiration from AI researchers of the past to attempt to unlock computational and mathematic models that underlie the processes of visual perception.

  • Teresa Vidal-Calleja

    University of Technology Sydney

    Teresa Vidal-Calleja is a robotics expert focusing on enabling robots to be deployed in environments that are hazardous or difficult for people to access. An Associate Professor and Research Director at the Robotics Institute, School of Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering at UTS, Teresa’s research interests include robotics perception, alternative sensing, inertial fusion, SLAM, continuous mapping, aerial and ground robots cooperation, autonomous navigation, automatic recognition, digital engineering, with applications in manufacturing, the meat and livestock sector, mining, and construction and logistics. As co-lead of Program 1 of the Australian Cobot Centre (ACC) an ARC Industry Transformation and Training Centre, she aims to help the manufacturing industry in the adoption of collaborative robots. In 2012, Teresa joined the Robotics Institute (formerly Centre for Autonomous Systems) at UTS where she was a UTS Chancellors Research Fellow and later Senior Lecturer. She has been a Visiting Scholar with the Active Vision Laboratory at the University of Oxford in the UK, and, more recently, with the Autonomous Systems Lab, ETH Zürich in Switzerland and the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Germany. She received her B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in 2000, an M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering (mechatronics options) from CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico City, in 2002, and her Ph.D. degree in automatic control, computer vision, and robotics from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, in 2007. She was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France, and at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, at the University of Sydney. She is currently an IEEE Senior member, treasurer of the Australian Robotics and Automation Association and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and Field Robotics Journal.

  • Previous International Speakers

    2021

    Hanna Kurniawati (Australian National University)
    Gamini Dissanyake (University of Technology Sydney)
    Fabio Ramos (University of Sydney)

    2020

    Tobi Delbruck (ETH Zurich and The Institute of Neuroinformatics, Zurich)
    Stefan Leutenegger (Imperial College London)
    Donald Dansereau (University of Sydney)

    2019
    Laura Leal-Taixé (Technical University of Munich)
    Seth Hutchinson (Georgia Institute of Technology)
    Jose Neira (University of Zaragoza)
    Silvere Bonnabel (Mines ParisTech)
    Tarek Hamel (University of Nice Sophia Antipolis)

    2018
    Margarita Chli (ETH Zurich)
    Vincent LePetit (University of Bordeaux)
    Yarin Gal (University of Oxford)
    Andrea Cherubini (University of Montpellier)

    2017
    Davide Scaramuzza (University of Zurich)
    Simon Lucey (Carnegie Mellon University)
    Javier Civera (University of Zaragoza)
    Sebastien Rougeaux (Seeing Machines)

    2016
    Frank Dellaert (Georgia Institute of Technology)
    Jana Kosecka (George Mason University)
    Paul Newman (University of Oxford)

    2015
    Raquel Urtasun (University of Toronto / Uber)
    Andrew Davison (Imperial College London)
    Fredrik Kahl (Chalmers University of Technology)
    Lourdes De Agapito Vicente (University College London)