Speakers

Moritz Bächer is the Lab Director of Disney Research Imagineering in Zurich, leading hardware and software research in Physical AI to scale the rapid design, build, and full autonomy of robotic characters, such as the BDX Droids and Olaf. His work bridges artistic intent and physical reality by combining differentiable simulation, reinforcement learning, and foundation and world models into a unified robotic character platform. Through this platform, his team enables robotic characters to execute dynamic motion, express rich emotion, and achieve believable autonomy through real-time perception, localization, and reasoning to interact seamlessly with humans in complex environments. Moritz holds a Ph.D. from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a master's degree from ETH Zurich.

Prof. Aude Billard is head of the LASA laboratory at the School of Engineering at the Swiss Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), academic director of the EPFL Robotics Center, Vice-president of the Swiss Robotics Association.

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.

Dr. Marko Bjelonic is a roboticist and entrepreneur known for pioneering Physical AI. He is the co-founder and CEO of RIVR (formerly known as Swiss-Mile), a Zurich-based Physical AI and robotics company that deploys autonomous legged delivery robots for real-world doorstep delivery. RIVR was acquired by Amazon in March 2026.

Dr. Cesar Cadena is a Senior Scientist at the Robotic Systems Lab, part of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich, where he also serves as Managing Director and Director of Education for ETH Center for Robotics. His research sits at the intersection of perception and learning in robotics, focusing on how machines can understand and navigate dynamic environments through sensory data. His work spans semantic and geometric scene understanding, semantic mapping, place recognition, data association, and SLAM, with an emphasis on building robust, modular, and introspective perception systems for long-term, persistent operation in changing environments

Dr. Sylvain Calinon is a Senior Research Scientist at the Idiap Research Institute and a Lecturer at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He heads the Robot Learning & Interaction group at Idiap, bringing expertise in human-robot collaboration, robot learning from demonstration, geometric representations, and optimal control. His group champions a frugal learning approach to robot manipulation skill acquisition, defining "frugality" through two key objectives: 1) acquiring manipulation skills from only a few human demonstrations or exploration trials, and 2) learning only the components of the skill that genuinely need to be learned. The approaches developed by his group apply to a wide range of domains involving manipulation skills, from robots that operate close to us (assistive and industrial robots) or act as extensions of us (prosthetics and exoskeletons), to those controlled from a distance (shared control and teleoperation).

Alessandro Giusti is a Professor of AI for Autonomous Robotics at the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IDSIA), University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland (SUPSI), where he leads the autonomous robotics research area. His research focuses on Deep Learning applications, Self-Supervised robot learning, and Human-Robot Interaction. His seminal paper on using deep learning for robot navigation in forests has received the Most Impactful Paper Award by the Swiss NCCR Robotics consortium in 2022. He was also part of the winning team of the 1st Nanocopter AI challenge (Delft, September 2022), and won three grand challenges in biomedical image analysis; six of his works were also awarded best paper, best demo, and best video prizes at HRI, AAAI, ISVC, IEEE VIS, and the IEEE Communication Society.

David Hoeller is the CTO and co-founder of Flexion Robotics. Before co-founding Flexion, David spent seven years at NVIDIA, most recently as a Research Manager. He holds a PhD from ETH Zurich and has published extensively on learning-based control for legged robots. His contributions to Isaac Gym and related simulation tools helped advance large-scale simulation as a foundation for training agile robotic behaviors.

Marco Hutter is a Professor for robotic systems and Director of the Center for Robotics at ETH Zurich. Since 2024, he leads the Zurich office of the RAI Institute. His research interests are in the development of novel machines and their intelligence to operate in rough and challenging environments. Together with his team, he realized a number of legged robots, mobile manipulators, and autonomous excavators that find applications including industrial inspection, construction, household assistance, and extraterrestrial exploration. Marco is a co-founder of several ETH startups, including ANYbotics, RIVR, Flexion, and Gravis Robotics.

Robert Katzschmann is Assistant Professor of Robotics at ETH Zurich and head of the Soft Robotics Lab. His group builds robots that are soft, musculoskeletal, and partly alive, from electrohydraulic muscles to living biohybrid tissue on printed scaffolds to dexterous hands that learn in the real world. Before ETH he did his PhD and postdoc at MIT and co-founded Mimic Robotics. He recently received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award.

Dr. Anca-Georgiana Rusu is the Executive Director of the Swiss Robotics Association and Community Manager at the EPFL Robotics Center. Working at the intersection of research, innovation and community building, she plays a central role in connecting Switzerland’s robotics ecosystem and translating scientific excellence into meaningful collaborations and opportunities.

As EPFL’s focal point for robotics, Anca brings together academic laboratories, industry partners, start-ups, students and public institutions. She coordinates strategic visits to EPFL robotics laboratories and develops initiatives that strengthen the visibility and impact of robotics within Switzerland and internationally. Until the program concluded in 2025, Anca coordinated the Innovation Booster Robotics.

Before moving into robotics and innovation, Anca spent more than six years as a Project Manager at EPFL’s International Risk Governance Center. There, she led interdisciplinary research projects examining the opportunities, risks and governance challenges associated with emerging technologies.

Anca holds a Master’s degree in Social Sciences, specializing in communication and culture, from the University of Lausanne. She earned her PhD from Paris Dauphine University, where her research explored how organizational communication shapes the development and adoption of emerging technologies, with a particular focus on artificial intelligence.

Marco Tempest is a cyber-illusionist and Partner for Creative Technology and Innovation at ETH Zurich | Space. As a Director's Fellow at the MIT Media Lab and Creative Technologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he spent years using the tools of magic: stagecraft, psychology, and narrative design, to make unimagined futures feel real. The results have funded multi-year research programs, aligned engineering teams across decades, and changed how some of the world’s most advanced organizations think about what’s possible.

Effy Vayena is Vice President for Knowledge Transfer and Corporate Relations and Full Professor of Bioethics at ETH Zurich. Internationally recognized for her work on the governance of digital technologies, artificial intelligence, health data, and other emerging technologies, she is also the founder and director of the Health Ethics and Policy Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that brings together expertise from the social sciences, ethics, law, engineering, and the life sciences to address the challenges and opportunities posed by technological innovation. Her research examines how advances in biomedicine, data analytics, and AI can be developed and deployed responsibly to maximize societal benefit while safeguarding fundamental ethical values.

Vayena has held appointments at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, where she was a Fellow and later Faculty Associate, and previously served as Associate Vice President for Digital Transformation and Governance at ETH Zurich. She has co-chaired the World Health Organization's Expert Advisory Group on Artificial Intelligence, Health Ethics and Governance and is an elected member of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences. She also serves on the Advisory Board for the World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report.

A recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, Vayena has published more than 400 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and co-edited several books. She regularly advises governments, international organizations, and public and private sector leaders on issues related to digitalization, artificial intelligence, and the responsible governance of emerging technologies.

Klea Wenger, VC investor at Swisscom Ventures investing in industrial tech & robotics.

Thomas is currently working as professor and Head of ETH Zurich | Space, founding director of ETH’s GeoLab, and as a sought-after speaker, consultant and board member for Schindler group, Firefly, and McKinley. He was the longest continually running Head of Science at NASA from 2016 to 2022 responsible for 130 missions with 37 launches including JWST, Parker and Perseverance. Previously, he was a Professor for Space Science and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. Also, founder of one of the largest University-based Entrepreneurship programs worldwide - the Michigan Center for Entrepreneurship.

He holds an MS and PhD in physics/astrophysics from the University of Bern and received many awards and recognitions, including four honorary doctorates, and membership of the International Academy of Astronautics.