US-EU Workshop on Intelligent Manufacturing

Ruzena Bajcsy is the NEC Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the founding director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) in 2001.

Before joining UC Berkeley, she headed the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation (1999–2001).

From 1972 to 2001, she was a professor in the Computer and Information Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she established in 1978 the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing, and Perception (GRASP) Lab.

Throughout her 28 years at UPenn, she worked on robotics research, including computer vision, tactile perception, and in general the problem of system identification. She also worked on medical imaging, and developed with her students a digital anatomy atlas coupled with elastic matching algorithms that made it possible to automatically identify anatomic structures of the brain, first in X-ray tomography, later with MRI and positron image tomography. Use of this technology is now standard in medical practice.

Dr. Bajcsy is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1997) and National Academy of Medicine (1995) as well as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). In 2001 she received the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award, and in November 2002 she was named one of the 50 most important women in Discover Magazine. She is the recipient of the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Sciences (2009) and the IEEE Robotics and Automation Award (2013) for her contributions in the field of robotics and automation.

Her current research is in the use of robotic technology, namely measuring and extracting noninvasively kinematic and dynamic parameters of individual in order to assess their physical movement capabilities or limitations. If there are limitations, her students have designed assistive devices that can compensate for the lack of kinematic agility and /or physical strength.

Source: Berkeley | EECS

Prof. Vladimír Mařík received his PhD. in 1979 and DrSc. degree in 1989 from the Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic. For more than fifteen years he acted as the managing director of the Rockwell Automation Research Center, Prague. His main professional interests include distributed AI, multi-agent systems, knowledge based systems, machine learning, planning and scheduling for manufacturing. He acted as the Head of the Department of Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in the years 1999-2013. He is the founder and Scientific Director of the Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics, and Cybernetics of the Czech Technical University in Prague. He has been a member of the R&D&I Council of the Czech Republic (2011-2015 and since 2018). He is co-author of the National Initiative for Industry 4.0 of the Czech Republic and Board member of AICZECHIA, the Czech AI Community Network.

He is co-author, principal investigator and coordinator of Research and Innovation Centre on Advanced Industrial Production (RICAIP) since 2017 (H2020-Widespread-04-2017, Teaming Phase I, 2017 – 2018, approx.  EUR 400K; H2020-Widespread-01-2018-2019, Teaming Phase II, + ESIF OPRDE 2019-2026, approx.  EUR 50M). He is author of more than 160 articles/conference papers, co-editor of 17 books, co-author of 5 granted patents. He acted as coordinator of other projects in AI and industrial robotics, such as National Competence Centre on Cybernetics and AI (TA CR, EUR 8M). He received the Medal of Merit for service to the Czech Republic in the area of science by the President of the Czech Republic (2017), the Cross of Honour for Science and Art awarded by the President of the Republic of Austria (2003), Honoris Causa doctorate (dr.h.c.) from the Brno University of Technology (2003), top Czech science award Česká hlava – Invention (2010). He acted as Editor-in-chief of IEEE SMC Part C (2005-2013), Board member of IEEE SMC (2005 to present), has received the IEEE SMC Outstanding Contribution Award (2012) and has been Vice-president of IEEE SMC (2013 to present).

Source: CIIRC CTU

Wolfgang Wahlster is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and a pioneer of AI in Germany and Europe. As a founding director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and in his role as its long-time CEO and scientific director, he has developed DFKI into one of the world’s largest research institutions in this field with more than 1000 employees by 2019 and more than 100 successful spin-off companies. He has served as an elected President of three international AI organizations: IJCAII, EurAI, and ACL. He is an elected Fellow of AAAI, EurAI, and GI. As a professor at the world-renowned Informatics Campus at Saarland University, he laid some of the foundations for natural language dialog systems, user modelling, and speech-to-speech translation. His current research areas are multimodal dialog systems for human-centered AI and cyber-physical production systems for the fourth industrial revolution (Industrie 4.0), a concept that he coined in 2010. He currently heads the steering group for a national AI standardization roadmap of the German government and serves the DFKI management board as Chief Executive Advisor (CEA). He is on the Executive Board of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) at UC Berkeley and a member of the steering board of Germany’s platform for AI. Wahlster is a member of the Nobel Prize Academy in Stockholm, the German National Academy Leopoldina and three other prestigious academies. For his research, he has been awarded the German Future Prize, the First Class Cross of Merit and the Grand Cross of Merit by the Federal President of Germany. Other awards include four honorary doctorates from universities in Darmstadt, Linkoeping, Maastricht and Prague as well as an Honorary Citizenship of his hometown, Saarbruecken. For his substantial contributions to various fields of AI, Wolfgang Wahlster received the IJCAI Donald E. Walker Award in 2013 and the ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award of the ACM in 2016. As a member of numerous advisory bodies of the German Chancellor and the Federal Government such as the Partners for Innovation, the Research Union and the Data Ethics Commission, he has co-founded innovation platforms such as Industrie 4.0 and Learning Systems. He holds a seat on ten industrial supervisory boards and technical advisory boards of large companies, medium-sized enterprises and start-ups.

Source: DFKI