Steve Tanner obtained a Master in micro-engineering from EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) in 1996, and a Ph. D. in microelectronics on CMOS digital image sensors from the University of Neuchâtel in 2000. From 2001 to 2013, he worked as researcher and team leader at UniNE and EPFL on a wide range of R&D projects in mixed-signal integrated circuit design for many applications and industries. He authored or co-authored more than 30 scientific publications. He also worked in environmental protection in Ecuador from 2003 to 2005. In 2011, he co-founded Ecorobotix, a company developing, producing and selling farming machines for sustainable agriculture using AI and robotics technology. He is currently the CTO and leads the research and product development.

Stefano Mintchev is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Robotics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), Switzerland. He earned his Ph.D. in Bioinspired Robotics from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Italy in 2014. His postdoctoral research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) focused on bioinspired design principles for versatile aerial robots. In 2018, he co-founded Foldaway Haptics and served as its CTO until 2020, when he joined ETH Zurich. At ETH Zurich, Stefano leads a research group working at the intersection of robotics and environmental science, developing robust and scalable bioinspired robotic technologies for monitoring and promoting the sustainable use of natural resources.

Prof. Stefana Parascho is a researcher, architect, and educator whose work lies at the intersection of architecture, robotics and computational design. She is currently an Assistant Professor at EPFL where she founded the Lab for Creative Computation (CRCL).

Through her research, she has explored multi-agent fabrication methods, and their potential for architecture. Her current work focuses on human-robot collaborative processes and the relationship between robotic construction and the built environment. The work proposes methods in which humans and machines interact, communicate and jointly design and build full-scale structures, while addressing the current prevailing challenges of the construction field. Applications include scaffold-free construction of spanning structures, reconfiguration of existing buildings and autonomous robotic construction with found materials.

Her goal is to strengthen the interdisciplinary nature of the field by increasing accessibility of digital tools and connecting robotics research with societal aspects.

Before joining EPFL, Stefana was an Assistant Professor at Princeton University, where she led the CREATE Lab Princeton. She completed her doctorate in 2019 at ETH Zurich, Gramazio Kohler Research and received her Diploma in Architectural Engineering from the University of Stuttgart.

Prof. Mirko Kovac is a director of Laboratory of Sustainability Robotics at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) in Zürich and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Before his appointment at EPFL he was full Professor at Imperial College London and still holds a honoary Professor position at Imperial. His research group focusses on the development of novel mobile robots for distributed sensing and autonomous manufacturing in complex natural environments. Prof. Kovac’s particular specialisation is in robot design, hardware development and multi-modal sensor mobility.
He was post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University and obtained his PhD at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He received his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) in 2005.
Since 2006, he has presented his work in more than 100 peer reviewed publications in leading conferences and journals, has won several best paper awards and has delivered over 100 keynote and invited lectures. He also regularly acts as advisor to government, investment funds and industry on robotics opportunities.

Davide Scaramuzza is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at the University of Zurich. He did his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich, a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, and was a visiting professor at Stanford University and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His research focuses on autonomous, agile navigation of mobile robots using standard and event-based cameras. He has made fundamental contributions to visual-inertial state estimation, autonomous vision-based agile navigation of micro flying robots, and low-latency perception with event cameras, which were transferred to many products, from drones to automobiles, cameras, AR/VR headsets, and mobile devices. In 2022, his team demonstrated that an AI-powered drone could outperform the world champions of drone racing. He received several awards, including a recent IEEE Technical Field Award, the elevation to IEEE Fellow, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, a European Research Council Consolidator Grant, a Google Research Award, and many paper awards. In 2015, he co-founded Zurich-Eye, today Meta Zurich, which developed the head-tracking software of the Meta Quest. In 2020, he co-founded SUIND, which builds autonomous drones for precision agriculture. Many aspects of his research have been featured in the media, such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economist, and Forbes.

Prof. Aude Billard is head of the LASA laboratory at the School of Engineering at the Swiss Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL).

A.B. holds a B.Sc and M.Sc. in Physics from EPFL (1995) and a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence (1998) from the University of Edinburgh. A.B. was the recipient of 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 Best Reviewer Award and IEEE-RAS Distinguished Service Award. A. B.’s research spans the fields of machine learning and robotics with a particular emphasis on learning from sparse data and performing fast and robust retrieval. This work finds application to robotics, human-robot / human-computer interaction and computational neuroscience. This research received best paper awards from IEEE T-RO, RSS, ICRA, IROS, Humanoids and ROMAN and was featured in premier venues (BBC, IEEE Spectrum, Wired).

Aude Billard leads the Swiss National Thematic Network Innovation Booster on Robotics, a half a million fund in support of industrial-academic partnerships, and is the current president-elect of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

Anna Valente is Full Professor of Industrial Robotics. She got a Ph.D. in Manufacturing Technologies and Production Systems at Politecnico di Milano and a Post-doctorate in interoperability for adaptive factories from UBath, UK. Since 2006, she has been working in cooperation with big research institutions and industrial stakeholders operating in the manufacturing value chain. She is currently Head of the Laboratory for Automation, Robots and Machines with SUPSI-DTI-ISTePS where the core research deals with the design, engineering and prototyping of robotic solutions. She is the author of two books, several patents and more than 120 papers on system (re)configuration, robotics and control platforms. Since 2012 she has been coordinating several European and National Projects. She is Fellow member of CIRP – The International Academy for Production Engineering. She leads the SATW Advanced Manufacturing Platform. She was member of the Swiss Science Council SSC (elected in 2020), consultative body to the Federal Council, operating with Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research on the matter of science and educational policies and governance. In 2019, she has been awarded by the European Commission with the Woman-Led Innovation and the Grand Prix for Innovation. In 2021, she has been awarded with the Swiss DINNO Award by the President of the Swiss Confederation, Guy Parmelin.

She currently serves the Innosuisse and Swissphotonics Advisory Boards.