Meet the speakers

Mihaela van der Schaar is the John Humphrey Plummer Professor of Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Medicine at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute in London. In addition to leading the van der Schaar Lab, Mihaela is founder and director of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine (CCAIM).Mihaela was elected IEEE Fellow in 2009. She has received numerous awards, including the Oon Prize on Preventative Medicine from the University of Cambridge (2018), a National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2004), 3 IBM Faculty Awards, the IBM Exploratory Stream Analytics Innovation Award, the Philips Make a Difference Award and several best paper awards, including the IEEE Darlington Award.Mihaela is personally credited as inventor on 35 USA patents (the majority of which are listed here), many of which are still frequently cited and adopted in standards. She has made over 45 contributions to international standards for which she received 3 ISO Awards. In 2019, a Nesta report determined that Mihaela was the most-cited female AI researcher in the U.K.

Athina Tzovara is an assistant professor at the Institute of Computer Science at the Faculty of Science and the Center for Experimental Neurology at the Faculty of Medicine, at the University of Bern, Switzerland. She received a diploma in electrical and computer engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece in 2009, and a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Lausanne, Switzerland in 2012. She then moved to the University of Zurich as a postdoctoral researcher the University College London, UK as an honorary research associate, and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, at the University of California Berkeley, USA. Her research combines modeling and machine learning techniques with invasive and non-invasive measures of neural activity in humans, to study the neural mechanisms that support human cognition in health and disease.

Professor Thalmann is Director of MIRALab at the University of Geneva, a ground breaking research lab developing Virtual Humans and Social Robotics. She and her team has authored dozens of books, published more than 600 papers on virtual humans/virtual worlds and social robots. Professor Thalmann has delivered more than 300 keynote addresses, some of them at global events as the World Economic Forum in Davos. During her illustrious career, she has worked in NTU in Singapore as the Director of the interdisciplinary Institute for Media Innovation. She participated in more than 50 European research projects, helping MIRALab to develop revolutionising interdisciplinary research in computer graphics, computer animation, and virtual worlds and producing impactful work that synergises art, fashion, computer graphics and cultural heritage simulations. Some recent work includes the 3D see through virtual patient. In NTU, Singapore, she revolutionized social robotics by unveiling the first social robot Nadine that can have mood and emotions and remember people and actions. Besides having bachelor's and master's degrees in disciplines such as psychology, biology, chemistry and computer science, Professor Thalmann completed her PhD in quantum physics at the University of Geneva. She has received honorary doctorates from Leibniz University of Hannover and the University of Ottawa in Canada and several prestigious other awards as the Humboldt Research Award in Germany. She is Editor-in-Chief of The Visual Computer, co-Editor-in-Chief of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds. She is a life member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences.

Prof. Andrea Cavallaro is the Idiap Director and a Full Professor at EPFL. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Signal Processing: Image Communication, as Senior Area Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, as member of the IEEE Video Signal Processing and Communication Technical Committee and as member of the Technical Directions Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He is a Turing Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) for “contributions to image processing and multi-sensor scene understanding.”His research interests include machine learning for multimodal perception, computer vision, machine listening, and information privacy. He has published over 270 journal and conference papers, one monograph on Video tracking (2011, Wiley) and three edited books: Multi-camera networks (2009, Elsevier); Analysis, retrieval and delivery of multimedia content (2012, Springer); and Intelligent multimedia surveillance (2013, Springer). He has been Full Professor at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) since 2010, where he was the founding Director of the Centre for Intelligent Sensing and the Director of Research of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from EPFL in 2002. He was a Research Fellow with British Telecommunications (BT) in 2004 and was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering Teaching Prize in 2007; three student paper awards on target tracking and perceptually sensitive coding at IEEE ICASSP in 2005, 2007 and 2009; and the best paper award at IEEE AVSS 2009. He was selected as IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer (2020-2021) and is the past Chair of the IEEE Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee (2020-2021). He also served as elected member of the IEEE Multimedia Signal ProcessingTechnical Committee and chair of the Awards committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee.

Aude Billard is full professor, head of the LASA laboratory and the Associate Dean for Education in School at the School of Engineering at the Swiss Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Prof Billard currently serves as the President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, director of the ELLIS Robot Learning Program and co-director of the Robot Learning Foundation, a non-profit corporation that serves as the governing body behind the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), and leads the Innovation Booster Robotics, a program funding technology transfer in robotics and powered by the Swiss Innovation Agency, Innosuisse.

Prof Billard holds a BSc and MSc in Physics from EPFL and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. Prof Billard is an IEEE Fellow and the recipient of numerous recognitions, among which the Intel Corporation Teaching award, the Swiss National Science Foundation career award, the Outstanding Young Person in Science and Innovation from the Swiss Chamber of Commerce, the IEEE RAS Distinguished Award, and the IEEE-RAS Best Reviewer Award. Dr. Billard was a plenary speaker at major robotics, AI and Control conferences (ICRA, AAAI, CoRL, HRI, CASE, ICDL, ECML, L4DC, IFAC Symposium, ROMAN, Humanoids and many others) and acted on various positions on the organization committee of numerous International Conferences in Robotics. Her research spans the fields of machine learning and robotics with a particular emphasis on fast and reactive control and on safe human-robot interaction. This research received numerous best conference paper awards, as well as the prestigious King-Sun Fu Memorial Award for the best IEEE Transaction in Robotics paper, and is regularly featured in premier venues (BBC, IEEE Spectrum, Wired).

Gustau Camps-Valls (born 1972 in València) is a Physicist and Full Professor in Electrical Engineering in the Universitat de València, Spain, where lectures on machine learning, remote sensing and signal processing. He is the Head of the Image and Signal Processing (ISP) group, an interdisciplinary group of 40 researchers working at the intersection of AI for Earth and Climate sciences.

Marco Zaffalon is a University Professor and Scientific Director at IDSIA. He has 160+ refereed publications on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and his research has overall been supported by 15 million francs in competitive grants. Marco is a Senior Area Editor of the International Journal of Approximate Reasoning, as well as Senior Program Committee Member for IJCAI, AAAI, and UAI, and has been a past President of the Society for Imprecise Probability.At IDSIA he founded the group on probabilistic machine learning that has grown up to 40 researchers. In his applied research he has worked with UBS, Novartis, Mastercard, and several other world’s largest companies.In 2020 he co-founded Artificialy, a company for products and services in AI employing 25 people, where he works as the company's Chief Scientist.

Giusi Moffa is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the University of Basel. At the heart of her research are causal graphical models and their translational value in health care, clinical research and epidemiology. Real-world problems motivate her work on statistical methods for causal discovery and techniques for estimating intervention effects from observational data. Giusi holds a PhD in computational statistics from the University of Bristol, UK. After conducting post-doctoral research in statistical bioinformatics at the University of Regensburg, Germany, Giusi gained experience as a statistician in clinical drug development in the pharma industry at Novartis, Basel, before returning to academia.