Ali Muhammad is a Senior Scientist at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. He obtained his Ph.D. in the field of robotics (2011) from Tampere University of Technology (TUT). Since 2001, he has been involved in the research on several robotics projects. Ali has authored and co-authored over 32 publications in the fields of robotics, control, teleoperation, haptics, modelling and simulation and formal validation, and verification of control system. He represents VTT on euRobotics and EFFRA technology platforms. Additionally, Ali has over 15 years of experience of implementing and coordinating several national and international projects in industry and academia. He has led multinational and multidisciplinary teams of mechanical, electrical, software and control engineers for successful completion of projects on control systems and robotics. Ali has been part of I4MS CSA, which developed the DIHs across Europe and created a mentoring program for the DIHs. Currently, he is the coordinator of L4MS (Logistics for Manufacturing SMEs), Better Factory (Grow your Manufacturing Business) DIH² (A Pan-European Network of Robotics DIHs for Agile Production), leading the largest DIHs with a network on manufacturing, covering 26 European countries.
Cees Snoek is a full professor in computer science at the University of Amsterdam, where he heads the Intelligent Sensory Information Systems Lab. He is also a director of three public-private AI research labs: QUVA Lab with Qualcomm, Atlas Lab with TomTom and AIM Lab with the Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence. At University spin-off Kepler Vision Technologies he acts as Chief Scientific Officer. He is also the director of the master program in Artificial Intelligence and co-founder of the Netherlands Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence. He was previously visiting scientist at Carnegie Mellon University and UC Berkeley, head of R&D at University spin-off Euvision Technologies and managing principal engineer at Qualcomm Research Europe.His research interests focus on video and image sensing. He has published over 200 refereed journal and conference papers, has been on the editorial board of several international journals and frequently serves as an area chair of the major conferences in computer vision and multimedia. Professor Snoek is the lead researcher of the award-winning MediaMill Semantic Video Search Engine, which is the most consistent top performer in the yearly NIST TRECVID evaluations. He was general chair of ACM Multimedia 2016 in Amsterdam and initiator of the VideOlympics 2007-2009. Cees is recipient of an NWO Veni career award, a Fulbright Junior Scholarship, an NWO Vidi career award, and the Netherlands Prize for ICT Research. Together with his Ph.D. students and Post-docs he has won several best paper awards.
Ivona Cetinić is an oceanographer in the Ocean Ecology Laboratory at Universities Space Research Association / NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Her research focuses on developing new ways of resolving ocean biogeochemistry and phytoplankton diversity from satellite and other remote observations. At the University of Southern California, she conceived of and participated in ield campaigns focused on developing innovative ocean observing technology, several for which she served as chief scientist. These campaigns include the ground breaking Tara Oceans circumnavigation of the globe, as well as others that utilized unique fusions of cutting edge technology such as hyperspectral radiometry, light polarimeters, and airborne lidar, allowing for more detailed information about concentration and composition of particles in the ocean (as well as the atmosphere - SABOR). Dr. Cetinic has served as the project scientist for EXPORTS (EXport Processes in the Ocean from RemoTe Sensing), a large scale NASA-led field campaign, and as the PACE (Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem) Project Science Lead for Ocean Biogeochemistry, a NASA mission scheduled for launch in 2022. In the last 10 years, she has been a member of multiple international science teams and committees and has served as the co-chair of the Ocean Optics Conference. Currently, she is serving at National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Earth Sciences and Applications from Space. She earned her Ph.D. in biological oceanography at University of Southern California in 2009.
Jamileh Javidpour (1973) is an Assistant/Associated Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, in the department of Biology. She is interested in the marine food web where jellyfish (cnidarians and ctenophores) take over the top predator position or build a bloom, motivated by growing attention in ecological role of jellies for the ocean under climate change. Her research questions are revolving around the ecological role of jellies on marine ecosystems including invasion ecology, developmental biology and deep-sea ecology. She has participated in 13 international and national research projects and has co-authored numerous articles in the field. Most notably, she has been the coordinator of Horizon 2020 project “GoJelly” (total budget of 6 million €), co-inventor of a patent (Flow2Vortex), winner of the Innovation prize at GEOMAR, has featured in over 3000 magazines, newspapers, radio and TV interviews; she has been teaching and coordinating middle-sized researchships (Alkor and Poseidon), guest editor for special topic “From pollution to solution, innovations in and from the Sea” in Frontiers in Marine Science, as well as subject editor for the Journal of Marine Biology Research.
Petrica Stroi (1967) is the current technical director of the Administration for water basins for the Somes-Tisa region of Romania (Administratia bazinala de apa Somes-Tisa). This is a subdivision of the Romanian Waters National Administration (Apele Romane), a public institution of national interest with legal personality. It is financed from its own revenues, under the coordination of the central public authority in the field of waters, respectively the Ministry of Environment, Waters and Forests. Mr. Stroi is a hydrotechnical engineer with a specialization on hydrotechnical constructions, and has working experience in quantitative and qualitative water management in different geographic areas of Romania. He has been the co-author of a chapter of the 'Water Management and the Environment: Case Studies' book, published in 2018.
Prof. Robert Babuska received the M.Sc. (Hons.) degree in control engineering from the Czech Technical University in Prague, in 1990, and the Ph.D. (cum laude) degree from TU Delft, the Netherlands, in 1997. He has had faculty appointments with the Czech Technical University in Prague and with the Electrical Engineering Faculty, TU Delft. Currently, he is a full professor of Intelligent Control and Robotics at TU Delft, Faculty 3mE, Department of Cognitive Robotics. He has extensive experience with leading research project teams and in 2012 he established the TU Delft Robotics Institute (robotics.tudelft.nl) of which was the scientific director until 2016. His research interests include adaptive and learning control, reinforcement learning, nonlinear system identification, state estimation, and dynamic multi-agent systems. He has been involved in the applications of these techniques in various fields, ranging from process control to robotics and aerospace. Dr. Babuska has published three research monographs, three edited books, and over 280 scientific papers. He is the recipient of the 2009 Andrew P. Sage Award for the best paper published annually in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. He served as the chair of the IFAC technical committee on Cognition and Control and as associate editor in several archived journals, including Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.
Ruud Baartmans (1967) is a senior project manager at TNO Strategic Analysis & Policy, department of Strategy & Policy. He has a BASc in biotechnology and is employed by TNO since 1997. From 2005 he gained a broad experience with project management of various research projects on environment, policy, water management, sustainability in the built environment, key enabling technologies and Digital Innovation Hubs, on national and European (FP6, FP7, H2020) level. Ruud was involved in the development of the Dutch Smart Industry Implementation Agenda (2018) and the Dutch National Agenda Photonics (2019). Currently he is the project coordinator of H2020 DIHNET.EU. This CSA aims to create a sustainable pan-European network of networks, with a focus on regional Digital Innovation Hubs. Ruud is also part of the H2020 RODIN project, a pan-European network of networks aiming to bring together European Digital Innovation Hubs in robotics on healthcare, agile production, infrastructure inspection and maintenance, and agri-food.
