Roberto Manduchi

Departament of Computer Engineering

University of California at Santa Cruz, USA

He is Professor of Computer Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. His research focuses on assistive technology for the visually impaired. Professor Roberto Manduchi explores the use of mobile computer vision and wearable sensors to provide a blind person with increased spatial awareness.

Professor Roberto Manduchi holds a "Dottorato di ricerca" in Electrical Engineering from the Universita' di Padova, Italy. Prior to joining UCSC in 2001, he worked at Apple, Inc. and at NASA JPL.

He currently collaborates with SKERI (San Francisco), and the UC Berkeley School of Optometry. He is also a consultant for Aquifi, and serve on the scientific advisory board of Aira

Sertac Karaman

Laboratory of Information and Decision Systems

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Sertac Karaman is an Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (since Fall 2012).

His research interests lie in the broad areas of robotics and control theory. In particular, he studies the applications of probability theory, stochastic processes, stochastic geometry, formal methods, and optimization for the design and analysis of high-performance cyber-physical systems.The application areas of his research include driverless cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, distributed aerial surveillance systems, air traffic control, certification and verification of control systems software, and many others.

He is the recipient of an IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award in 2017, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2017, Army Research Office Young Investigator Award in 2015, National Science Foundation Faculty Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2014, AIAA Wright Brothers Graduate Award in 2012, and an NVIDIA Fellowship in 2011.

Adolfo Guzmán Arenas

Centro de Investigación en Computación

Dr. Adolfo Guzman-Arenas is an Engineer from Instituto Politecnico Nacional (National Polytechnic Institute, or Politecnico), in Mexico City. He obtained his M. Sc. and Ph. D. in Computer Science from M.I.T., in Boston, Mass., USA.

He was Professor at the Electrical Engineering Department (M.I.T.); at the Department of Mechanical Intelligence (University of Edinburgh); at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV-Politecnico), where he founded the M. Sc. and Ph. D. programs in Computer Science; at the Institute for Applied Mathematics and Systems (National University of Mexico), where he was Head of the Computer Science Department; and at the Interdisciplinary Unit of Politecnico (UPIICSA).

He received from the President of Mexico in 1996, the National Prize in Sciences and Arts, for contributions to “Technology and Design,” and from his same hands, in 1997, the “Lazaro Cardenas” award.

In 1996 he founded the Centro de Investigacion en Computacion (Center for Computing Research, or CIC) at Politecnico, and directed it until 2002. In that year was nominated “Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)”, and member of the Publications Board of ACM. Now, he conducts research at CIC in distributed processing, data warehouses, data mining and agents.

His main interest is the use of Artificial Intelligence in data mining, semantic processing and applications of information systems. He is also interested in vision and pattern recognition.