Auke Ijspeert is a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland (EPFL), IEEE Fellow, and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory. He has a B.Sc./M.Sc. in physics from the EPFL (1995), and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (1999). He has been at EPFL since 2002, where he was first a Swiss National Science Foundation assistant professor, then an associate professor (2009), and since 2016 a full professor. His research interests are at the intersection between robotics and computational neuroscience. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to gain a better understanding of animal locomotion and movement control, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and locomotion controllers (see for instance Ijspeert et al, Science, Vol. 315. no. 5817, pp. 1416 - 1420, 2007 and Ijspeert, Science Vol. 346, no. 6206, 2014). He is also interested in the control of exoskeletons for lower limbs. With his colleagues, he has received paper awards at ICRA2002, CLAWAR2005, IEEE Humanoids 2007, IEEE ROMAN 2014, CLAWAR 2015, and CLAWAR 2019. He is associate editor for Soft Robotics, the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, and the IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, and a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors of Science magazine.
Johannes T.B. (Bas) Overvelde started as a tenure-track Group Leader at AMOLF in 2016, where he started the Soft Robotic Matter Group. His group focusses on the design, fabrication and fundamental understanding of mechanical metamaterials and soft robots that are capable of autonomously adapting to – and even harnessing – variations in their environment. The group aims to uncover principles that help us understand how non-linearity and feedback can result in the emergence of complex – but useful – behaviour in soft actuated systems. Overvelde received both his BSc and MSc degrees at the TU Delft (NL) cum laude, and after receiving a Fulbright grant in 2012, in April 2016 Overvelde finished his PhD in Applied Mathematics at Harvard University (US).
Holk Cruse studied biology, physics and mathematics at the University of Freiburg/Breisgau (Germany). From 1981 until 2008 Professor for Biological Cybernetics/Theoretical Biology at the University of Bielefeld (Germany). Research focus on insect locomotion including behavioural studies as well as software and hardware simulation on both the reactive and the cognitive level.
Li Zhaoping obtained her B.S. in Physics in 1984 from Fudan University, Shanghai, and Ph.D. in Physics in 1989 from California Institute of Technology. She was a postdoctoral researcher in Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois USA, Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton New Jersey, USA, and Rockefeller University in New York USA. She has been a faculty member in Computer Science in Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and was a visiting scientist at various academic institutions. In 1998, Zhaoping's colleagues and her co-founded the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London. From October 2018, she is a professor at University of Tuebingen and the head of the Department of Sensory and Sensorimotor Systems at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tuebingen, Germany. Zhaoping's research experience throughout the years ranges from areas in high energy physics to neurophysiology and marine biology, with most experience in understanding the brain functions in vision, olfaction, and in nonlinear neural dynamics. In late 90s and early 2000s, she proposed a theory (which is being extensively tested) that the primary visual cortex in the primate brain creates a saliency map to automatically attract visual attention to salient visual locations. This theory, and the supporting experimental evidence, have led Zhaoping to propose a new framework for understanding vision. She is the author of Understanding Vision: theory, models, and data , Oxford University Press, 2014.