Invited Speakers
RODNEY BROOKS is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT. He is a robotics entrepreneur and Founder, Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics. He is also a Founder, former Board Member (1990 – 2011) and former CTO (1990 – 2008) of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT). Dr. Brooks is the former Director (1997 – 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He has published many papers in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, and artificial life. He was co-founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision and is a member of the editorial boards of various journals including Adaptive Behavior, Artificial Life, Applied Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Robots and New Generation Computing. He starred as himself in the 1997 Errol Morris movie “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control” named for one of his scientific papers, a Sony Classics picture, available on DVD.

Rodney Brooks
SAMI HADDADIN Rodney Brooksis full professor and director of the Institute of Automatic Control (IRT) at Leibniz University Hanover, Germany. Previously, he was the Scientific Coordinator of the “Human-Centered Robotics” group at the Robotics and Mechatronics Center of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and Lecturer at Technical University of Munich (TUM). In 2011 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and consulting scientist of Willow Garage, Inc., Palo Alto till 2013. He received degrees in Electrical Engineering (2006), Computer Science (2009), and Technology Management (2008) from TUM and Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU), respectively. He obtained his PhD with summa cum laude from RWTH Aachen in 2011. His research topics include physical Human-Robot Interaction, nonlinear robot control, real-time motion planning, real-time task and reflex planning, robot learning, optimal control, human motor control, variable impedance actuation, and safety in robotics. He was in the program/organization committee of several international robotics conferences and a guest editor of International Journal of Robotics Research. He published almost 100 scientific articles in international journals, conferences, and books. Recently, his book “Towards Safe Robots: Approaching Asimov’s 1st Law” was published. Among other things, he received five best paper and video awards at ICRA/IROS, the 2008 Literati Best Paper Award, the euRobotics Technology Transfer Award 2011, and the 2012 George Giralt Award. He won the IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award in 2012. Furthermore, he was a finalist of the 2009 Robotdalen Scientific Award, IROS 2010 Best Application Paper Award, and 2012 SfN BCI Award.