Plenary and Keynote Speakers

Dr. Clément Gosselin
Université Laval, Canada
Plenary Speaker

Cl´ement Gosselin received the B. Eng. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Universit´e de Sherbrooke, Qu´ebec, Canada, in 1985, and the Ph.D. degree from McGill University, Montr´eal, Qu´ebec, Canada in 1988. He was then a post-doctoral fellow at INRIA in Sophia-Antipolis, France in 1988–89. In 1989 he was appointed by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Universit´e Laval, Qu´ebec where he is a Full Professor since 1997. He held the Canada Research Chair in Robotics and Mechatronics at Laval from 2001 to 2021. He was a visiting researcher at the RWTH in Aachen, Germany in 1995, at the University of Victoria, Canada in 1996 and at the IRCCyN in Nantes, France in 1999. His research interests are kinematics, dynamics and control of robotic mechanical systems with a particular emphasis on the mechanics of grasping, the kinematics and dynamics of parallel manipulators and the development of human-friendly robots and haptic devices. His work in the aforementioned areas has been the subject of numerous publications in international journals and conferences as well as of several patents and two books. His publications have been cited more than 37000 times and he has an h-index of 98. He has directed many research initiatives, including collaborations with several Canadian and foreign high-technology companies and he has trained more than 130 graduate students. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal Mechatronics and a Senior Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
Dr. Gosselin received several awards including the ASME DED Mechanisms and Robotics Committee Award in 2008, the ASME Machine Design
Award in 2013 and the IFToMM Award of Merit in 2019. He was appointed Officer of the Order of Canada in 2010 for contributions to research in parallel mechanisms and underactuated systems. He is a fellow of the ASME, of the IEEE and of the Royal Society of Canada.

Topic of plenary: Design, Prototyping and Control of Low-Impedance Hybrid Robots for Intuitive Physical Human-Robot Interaction
Plenary Abstract

Dr. Henry Leung
University of Calgary, Canada
Plenary Speaker

Henry Leung is a professor of the Department of Electrical and Software Engineering of the University of Calgary. His current research interests include data analytic, information fusion, machine learning, signal and image processing, robotics, and internet of things. He has published over 350 journal papers and 250 refereed conference papers. Dr. Leung has been the associate editor of various journals such as the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine, International Journal on Information Fusion, IEEE Trans. Aerospace and Electronic Systems, IEEE Signal Processing Letters, IEEE Trans. Circuits and Systems, Scientific Reports He has also served as guest editors for the special issue “Intelligent Transportation Systems” for the International Journal on Information Fusion and “Cognitive Sensor Networks” for the IEEE Sensor Journal. He is the editor of the Springer book series on “Information Fusion and Data Science”. He is a Fellow of IEEE and SPIE.

Topic of plenary: 3D Perception for Autonomous Driving
Plenary Abstract

Dr. Robert Riener
University of Zurich, Switzerland
Plenary Speaker

Robert Riener is Full Professor for Sensory-Motor Systems at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich. He has been Assistant Professor for Rehabilitation Engineering at ETH Zurich since May 2003. In June 2006 he was promoted to the rank of an Associate Professor and in June 2010 to the rank of a Full Professor. As he holds a Double-Professorship with the University of Zurich, he is also active in the Spinal Cord Injury Center of the Balgrist University Hospital (Medical Faculty of the University of Zurich)

Robert Riener studied mechanical engineering at TU München and University of Maryland, USA, from 1988 till 1993. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree and the Dr. degree from the TU München in 1993 and 1997, respectively. In 1993 he joined the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering, where he has pursued research into neuroprosthetics. After postdoctoral work at the Centro di Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano from 1998 to 1999, he returned to the TU München, where he finished his Habilitation in the field of Biomechatronics about multi-modal VR applied to medicine in January 2003. Since his activity in Zurich Riener develops robots and interaction methods for motor learning in rehabilitation and sports.

Topic of plenary: How Rehabilitation Robots Can Cooperate and Motivate
Plenary Abstract

Dr. Chris W. Zhang
University of Saskatchewan, Canada
Plenary Speaker

Wenjun Zhang received his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering and Design from the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, in 1994. He is currently a full professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. His current research area is resilient robotics, soft robotics, computational design, mechatronics, and engineering informatics. He has published over 550 refereed technical publications, among which over 340 papers appear in refereed journals and over 220 papers in refereed conference proceedings, in a broad scope of fields, including design and mechatronics, manufacturing, robotics, informatics, and human-machine systems. He holds dozens of patents, including three US patents. His paper received the best journal paper award for 2012 by the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks. His papers received top 25 hottest articles by Mechatronics in 2006 &2005, by Expert Systems with Applications in 2011, by Microelectronics Journal. He has the google scholar H-index (61). He was highly cited authors by Elsevier (China) from 2015 to 2018 (inclusive). He was included in the top 2% world scientists by Stanford in 2020 – 2022. Dr. graduated over 38 PhD students and over 100 MS (thesis) students. He received 2012 Distinguished Graduate Supervisor Award by the University of Saskatchewan. He has served as a Senior Editor for the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, Associate Editor for several reputed journals including IEEE SMC – System, IEEE System Journal. He is an elected Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and Senior member of IEEE. Dr. Zhang can be reached by email (chris.zhang@usask.ca).

Topic of plenary: A Design-thinker for Design of Soft Robots
Plenary Abstract

Dr. Ali Etemad
Queen's University, Canada
Keynote Speaker

Dr. Etemad is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queen’s University in Canada, where he also holds the title of Mitchell Professor in AI for Human Sensing and Understanding. He is a member of the Ingenuity Labs Research Institute and leads the Ambient Intelligence and Interactive Machines (Aiim) lab. His primary research interests lie in machine learning and deep learning, with a focus on human-centered applications using wearables, smart devices, and smart environments. Prior to joining Queen’s, he worked in the industry for several years as a data scientist. His work has been published in top-tier venues such as CVPR, AAAI, ICCV, ECCV, ACM CHI, ICASSP, Interspeech, ICPR, T-PAMI, T-AFFC, and more. He has co-invented nine patents and delivered numerous invited talks at various events. Dr. Etemad serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence and has participated as a PC member/reviewer for several renowned conferences and journals, including NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, ICLR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, ACII (senior PC), ICASSP, ISWC, and ICMI, among others. He has held leadership roles in multiple events, such as General Chair for the AAAI Workshop on Human-Centric Self-Supervised Learning (2022), Publicity Co-Chair for the European Workshop on Visual Information Processing (2022), and Industry Relations Chair for the Canadian Conference on AI (2019). Dr. Etemad’s lab and research program have received funding from various organizations, including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, Ontario Centre of Innovation (OCI), Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), and private sector partners.

Topic of Keynote: Beyond Autonomous Driving: Understanding People for Customized User Experience