Tony Prescott
Tony Prescott holds a chair in Cognitive Robotics at the University of Sheffield, and is the Director of Sheffield Robotics an institute with over two hundred active researchers. His academic research spans robotics, computational neuroscience and machine learning, and has generated over 200 journal articles and conference papers. He is best known for his work on brain-based robots which he has developed to test theories in the brain sciences and to prototype useful brain-inspired technologies. In 2014, he co-founded the UK startup Consequential Robotics whose lead product, the animal-like companion robot MiRo, is the world's first commercial robot with a brain-based control system. Tony is also the co-founder of Living Machines, the international conference on biomimetic and biohybrid systems, now in its 9th year, and is the lead editor of the OUP Handbook of Living Machines, winner of the 2019 BMA basic and clinical sciences book award.
Todd Hylton
Dr. Todd Hylton is the Executive Director of the Contextual Robotics Institute and Professor of Practice in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UC San Diego. His research interests include novel computing systems and their application to autonomous vehicle and robotic systems. Prior to his appointment at UC San Diego, he was Executive Vice President of Strategy and Research at Brain Corporation, a San Diego-based robotics startup. From 2007 to 2012, Dr. Hylton served as a Program Manager at DARPA where he started and managed a number of projects including the Nano Air Vehicle program, the SyNAPSE program and the Physical Intelligence program. Prior to DARPA, he ran a nanotechnology research group at SAIC, co-founded 4Wave, a specialty semiconductor equipment business, and served as CTO of Commonwealth Scientific Corporation. Dr. Hylton received his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Stanford University in 1991 and his B.S. in Physics from M.I.T. in 1983.
Shahin Farshchi
Shahin empowers visionary founders aiming to accelerate humanity and build a fantastic future through feats of engineering. He built brainmachine interfaces for his PhD in Electrical Engineering, hybrids at General Motors, founded a wireless vital sign monitoring company, and as a Partner at Lux, has funded chip (Nervana), rocket (Relativity), satellite (Planet), robotics (Covariant.ai), and driverless car (Zoox) companies. Lux is a $2.4B VC that invests in tomorrow’s transformational companies across healthcare and technology.
Roger Levinson
Mr. Levinson most recently served as Vice President of Data Management at Rstor where he previously served as Vice President of ASIC Engineering. Mr. Levinson has also served as Vice President of Engineer at Rambus and Vice President/General Manager of Strategy and Innovation at Semtech. He held a variety of senior engineering positions prior to joining Semtech including at Intersil, Xicor, Analog Integration Partners, Exar ,and Micropower. Mr. Levison earned his Bachelor’s Degree from the University of California, Davis in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, and also earned his Masters Degree from the University of California, Davis in Electrical and Electronic Engineering.
Qiangfei Xia
Dr. Xia is a professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at UMass Amherst and head of the Nanodevices and Integrated Systems Lab (http://nano.ecs.umass.edu). Before joining UMass, he spent three years at the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2007 from Princeton University. Dr. Xia's research interests include beyond-CMOS devices, integrated systems and enabling technologies, with applications in machine intelligence, reconfigurable RF systems and hardware security. He is a recipient of DARPA Young Faculty Award, NSF CAREER Award, and the Barbara H. and Joseph I. Goldstein Outstanding Junior Faculty Award.
Phillip Oung
Paul Merolla
My research focus is to build more intelligent computers, drawing inspiration from neuroscience, engineering, and machine learning. I have been a lead designer on more than 10 brain-inspired chips, including Stanford’s Neurogrid and IBM’s TrueNorth chip. While my main expertise is designing low-power neural hardware, I am also passionate about developing algorithms for these systems aimed at solving real world problems.
Recently, I co-founded Neuralink, a startup based in San Francisco developing a high bandwidth interface for the nervous system. Before that, I was a research scientist in IBM's Brain-Inspired Computing group (2010 - 2016), and before that, I was a postdoctoral scholar in Stanford's Brains in Silicon lab (2006 - 2010). I received my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in Bioengineering (2006) and a BS from the University of Virginia in Electrical Engineering (2000).
Michael Milford
Professor Milford conducts interdisciplinary research at the boundary between robotics, neuroscience and computer vision and is a multi-award winning educational entrepreneur. His research models the neural mechanisms in the brain underlying tasks like navigation and perception to develop new technologies in challenging application domains such as all-weather, anytime positioning for autonomous vehicles. He is also one of Australia’s most in demand experts in technologies including self-driving cars, robotics and artificial intelligence, and is a passionate science communicator. He currently holds the position of Professor at the Queensland University of Technology, as well as Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow and Chief Investigator at the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision.
John Paul Strachan
John Paul is a Master Technologist and research team leader at Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA. He runs the Rebooting Computing team that builds novel types of hardware accelerators from emerging device technology, with expertise spanning materials, device physics, circuits, architectures, benchmarking and building prototype systems. The team’s interests span applications in machine learning, network security, and optimization.
John Paul has degrees in physics and electrical engineering from MIT and a PhD in applied physics from Stanford University. He has over 50 patents, has authored or co-authored over 65 peer-reviewed papers, and been the PI in many USG research grants. He has previously worked on nanomagnetic devices for memory for which he was awarded the Falicov Award from the American Vacuum Society, and has developed sensing systems for precision agriculture in a company which he co-founded. He serves in many professional societies including IEEE IEDM ExComm, the Nanotechnology Council ExComm, past program chair and steering member of the International Conference on Rebooting Computing.
Dimitri Kusnezov
Dr. Dmitri Kusnezov received A.B. degrees in Physics and in Pure Mathematics with highest honors from UC Berkeley. Following a year of research at the Institut fur Kernphysik, KFA-Julich, in Germany, he attended Princeton University earning his MS in Physics and Ph.D. in Theoretical Nuclear Physics. At Michigan State University, he conducted postdoctoral research and then became an instructor.
In 1991, he joined the faculty of Yale University as an assistant professor in physics, becoming an associate professor in 1996. He has served as a visiting professor at numerous universities around the world. Dr. Kusnezov has published over 100 articles and a book.
He joined federal service at the National Nuclear Security Administration in late 2001 and is a member of the Senior Executive Service and is also a Visiting Researcher at Yale. He currently serves as Deputy Under Secretary for A.I. and Technology.