Invited Talks

Biography

Harold Soh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he directs the Collaborative Learning and Adaptive Robots (CLeAR) group. Harold completed his Ph.D. at Imperial College London with Yiannis Demiris on online learning for assistive robots.

Harold's current research focusses on machine learning and decision-making for trustworthy collaborative robots. His work spans cognitive modeling (specifically human trust) to physical systems (perception with novel e-skins) and has been recognized with best paper award nominations at RSS, HRI, and IROS.

Harold has served on the HRI committee as LBR Co-Chair (2019) and on the Technical Advances PC as a member (2020) and chair (2021). He is an Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Human Robot Interaction (2021). He regularly serves as PC member or reviewer for the top publication venues in AI (NeurIPS, AAAI, IJCAI) and robotics (ICRA, IROS, RSS, HRI).

Biography

Wei-Shi (Jason) Zheng is a Second-Level Professor, Director of the Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing of the Ministry of Education, Deputy Director of the National Engineering Laboratory for Big Data Analytics and Application Technology, and Vice Dean of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute at Sun Yat-sen University.

He is a Distinguished Professor under the Ministry of Education's Changjiang Scholars Program (2022), an IAPR Fellow, a Royal Society Newton Advanced Fellow (2016), a recipient of the National Excellent Young Scientists Fund (2015), leader of an Outstanding Young Team funded by the Guangdong Natural Science Foundation (2023), and a Guangdong Leading Innovation Talent in Science and Technology (2017), among other honors.

He currently serves on the editorial boards of two leading international AI journals, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence Journal. He also serves on the editorial boards of international journals including Pattern Recognition; as an area chair for top-tier conferences such as CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, and NeurIPS; as Co-Chair of the Program Committee for ICME 2022; as Co-Chair of the Program Committee for the Chinese Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision (2023/2025); and as General Chair of VALSE 2025. He has been repeatedly named to Elsevier's Highly Cited Chinese Researchers list and Stanford University's list of the world's top 2% scientists.

He has published more than 200 papers in CCF-A venues, CAS Zone 1 journals, and Nature-branded journals, including more than 30 papers in IEEE T-PAMI, IJCV, SIGGRAPH, and Nature Communications. As principal investigator, he has led major research grants including key projects under the National Natural Science Foundation of China major research program, key joint-fund projects of the NSFC, two National Key R&D Program projects, a key subproject under a major NSFC joint project, and the NSFC Excellent Young Scientists Fund. He won first prize in the optical image track of the 2020 National Underwater Object Detection Algorithm Competition and has also won first place five times in competitions at top international conferences including CVPR.

His awards include the First Prize of the Natural Science Award from the China Society of Image and Graphics (2020), the First Prize of the Guangdong Natural Science Award (2019), the Second Prize of the National Teaching Achievement Award for Undergraduate Education (2023), and the Second Prize of the Ministry of Education Outstanding Scientific Research Achievement Award in Natural Science (2019).

Biography

Liming Chen is Distinguished Professor at École Centrale de Lyon, France, where he holds the Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and is a Senior Member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). His research focuses on embodied AI, robot learning, computer vision, and foundation models for robotics, with particular emphasis on manipulation, simulation, multimodal perception, and lifelong robot learning.

Over the past two decades, Professor Chen has led numerous national and European research projects in robotic manipulation, computer vision, and AI. His contributions include widely used datasets and open-source platforms such as Jacquard, PandaGym, FruitBin, and synthetic simulation frameworks for robotic grasping and manipulation. His research has also advanced domain adaptation, continual learning, 3D perception, tactile sensing, and simulation-to-real transfer.

Professor Chen has published more than 300 scientific papers and supervised over forty PhD students and postdoctoral researchers. He serves on the editorial boards and program committees of leading conferences and journals in robotics, computer vision, and artificial intelligence. He currently co–leads the French-Singaporian initiative on Embodied AI, aiming to develop foundation models for robotics.

His current research explores how large-scale simulation, generative AI, world models, and multimodal foundation models can enable robots to acquire versatile skills and operate robustly in complex real-world environments.

Biography

Hongsheng Li received the bachelor’s degree in automation from East China University of Science and Technology, and the master’s and doctorate degrees in computer science from Lehigh University, Pennsylvania, in 2006, 2010, and 2012, respectively. From 2013-2015, he was an associate professor in the School of Electronic Engineering at University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. He is currently an associate professor in the department of Electronic Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Biography

Yansong Tang is a tenure-track Associate Professor of Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, where he directs the IVG@SZ (Intelligent Vision Group at Shenzhen, the sister group of the IVG at Beijing). Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford, working with Prof. Philip H. S. Torr. His current research interests lie in computer vision and pattern recognition.

His academic service includes serving as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Image Processing and Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation; Area Chair for ICLR 2026, CVPR 2025, and FG 2023; conference reviewer for CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, and related venues; and journal reviewer for TPAMI, TIP, TMM, and TCSVT.