Agenda for the Symposium (first draft)

June 25, 2026

June 26, 2026

Kurhaus Baden-Baden

first speakers have already confirmed their participation: 

Tamim Asfour
is the Spokesperson of the Robotics Institute Germany (RIG) and Full Professor of Humanoid Robotics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. He directs the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H2T) at the Institute of Anthropomatics and Robotics. His research focuses on the engineering 24/7 humanoid robot systems that integrates artificial intelligence, informatics, and mechatronics to perform versatile tasks in the real world while learning from humans, experience and interaction with the environment Tamim is the developer of the ARMAR humanoid robot family. He has held visiting professorships at Georgia Tech, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and the National University of Singapore. He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), and is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE-RAS Humanoids Conference Editorial Board. He is also the scientific spokesperson of the KIT Center “Information · Systems · Technologies” (KCIST).

Oussama Khatib

Professor, Department of Computer Science & Director of Stanford Robotics Lab
His research in robotics focuses on novel control architectures, algorithms, sensing, and human-friendly designs for advanced capabilities in complex environments. With an emphasis on enabling robots to interact cooperatively and safely with humans and the physical world, these studies bring understanding of human movement for therapy, athletic training, and performance enhancement. This work on understanding human cognitive task representation and physical skills is enabling transfer for increased robot autonomy. With these core capabilities, we are exploring applications in healthcare and wellness, industry and service, farms and smart cities, and dangerous and unreachable settings – deep in oceans, mines, and space.

Dr. Satoshi Nakamura
is a presidential chair professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. He is also a professor emeritus at Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) and Honorarprofessor of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. He received his B.S. from Kyoto Institute of Technology in 1981 and Ph.D. from Kyoto University in 1992. He was an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Information Science at NAIST from 1994-2000. He was Department head and Director of ATR Spoken Language Communication Research Laboratories in 2000-2004, and 2005-2008, respectively, and Vice president of ATR in 2007-2008. He was Director General of Keihanna Research Laboratories and the Executive Director of Knowledge Creating Communication Research Center, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan 2009-2010. He moved to Nara Institute of Science and Technology as a full professor in 2011. He established the Data Science Center at NAIST and served as a director from 2017 to 2021. He also served as a team leader of the Tourism Information Analytics Team at the AIP center of RIKEN Institute, Japan, from 2017-2021. He is currently a full professor and Presidential Chair Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China. His research interests include modeling and systems of spoken language processing, speech processing, spoken language translation, spoken dialog systems, natural language processing, and data science. He is one of the world leaders in speech-to-speech translation research. He has been serving various speech-to-speech translation research projects, including C-Star, A-Star, and the International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation IWSLT. He is currently the chairperson of ISCA SIG SLT (Spoken Language Translation). He also contributed to the standardization of the network-based speech translation at ITU-T. He was a committee member of IEEE SLTC 2016-2018. He was an Elected Board Member of the International Speech Communication Association, ISCA, from 2012 to 2019. He received the Antonio Zampolli Prize in 2012 and retained the title of IEEE Fellow, ISCA Fellow, IPSJ Fellow, and ATR Fellow.

Marco Trombetti
Computer scientist, entrepreneur, and investor. In 1999, he co-founded Translated, which pioneered the symbiotic use of artificial intelligence in the language industry. Through Translated, Trombetti introduced adaptive machine translation, delivered the first commercial application of the transformer, and fostered a symbiotic relationship between professional translators and AI. Leveraging the success of Translated and other ventures, Marco co-founded Pi Campus, a venture capital firm investing in AI-applied startups, and Pi School, an educational institution dedicated to training the next generation of AI specialists.

Hans Uszkoreit
German AI researcher specialized in language and knowledge technologies. He mostly lives in Beijing now where he is the co-founder and scientific leader of the Artificial Intelligence Technology Center (AITC) and the Chief AI Advisor of the Lenovo Corporation.
He is also continuing to work for the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) as a Scientific Director with a focus on China cooperations and smart data projects.
He is also a Principal Investigator of the Berlin Big Data Center, and of the German Smart Data Forum in Berlin, of the  Cluster of Excellence MMCI, and of the Collaborative Research Center 1102 at Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken.
On a small scale, he is continuing to teach and supervising students as Honorary Professor of the Technische Universität Berlin.
He is also involved in several young technology enterprises as co-founder and advisor.

Jakob Uszkoreit
Together with Rhiju Das, he co-founded ‘Inceptive’ in 2021 to use deep learning and high-throughput experiments to learn life's languages.
Before Inceptive, he conducted deep learning research in Google Brain, built the language understanding team of the Google Assistant and worked on Google Translate during its early days. Some of his work over the years was published.

Manuela M. Veloso
Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emerita, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
2018-2026 Founder and Head, JPMorganChase AI Research, Managing Director
Manuela Veloso is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emerita at Carnegie Mellon University, where she has been since the early 90s as faculty in the Computer Science Department and then Head of the Machine Learning Department. From 2018 to 2026, she was the founder and Head of JPMorganChase AI Research.

Veloso has a licenciatura degree in Electrical Engineering and an M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, an M.A. in Computer Science from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Veloso has Doctorate Honoris Causa degrees from the Örebro University, Sweden, the Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE), Portugal, the Université de Bordeaux, France, and the Universidade Católica of Portugal.

She served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and she is co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of main professional organizations in her area, namely AAAI, IEEE, AAAS, and ACM. She is the recipient of the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award, the Einstein Chair of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an NSF Career Award, and the Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research. Veloso is a member of the National Academy of Engineering with a citation “for contributions to artificial intelligence and its applications in robotics and the financial services industry.” She is also a member of the Academy of Sciences of Portugal.

Her research interests are in AI, including Multiagent Systems, Autonomous Robots, Continual Learning Agents, and AI in Finance.

Sethu Vijayakumar
Professor Sethu Vijayakumar FRSE holds a Personal Chair in Robotics within the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and is the Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics and Programme Director for Robotics and AI at The Alan Turing Institute, helping shape and drive the UK national agenda in Robotics and Autonomous Systems. Since 2007, he holds the Senior Research Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering, co-funded by Microsoft Research and is also an Adjunct Faculty of the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles and a Visiting Research Scientist at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Labs, Kyoto-Japan. He has a PhD (1998) in Computer Science and Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Prof. Vijayakumar previously held the position of the Director of IPAB (2005-2015), Reader (2007-2010) and Lecturer (2003-2007) at the University of Edinburgh, a Research Assistant Professor (2001-2003) at USC and a Staff Scientist (1998-2000) at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Tokyo. His research interest spans a broad interdisciplinary curriculum involving basic research in the fields of robotics, statistical machine learning, motor control, planning and optimization in autonomous systems and computational neuroscience. One of his flagship projects (2016) involved a collaboration with the NASA Johnson Space Centre on the Valkyrie humanoid robot being prepared for unmanned robotic pre-deployment missions to Mars. See here for a list of his publications [Google Scholar]. Sethu is a keen science communicator [see one of his TED talks ] and in recent years, has been active in conceptualising, producing and presenting several public outreach events to engage with the general public and children on all things science and engineering. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the winner of the 2015 Tam Dalyell Prize for Excellence in Engaging the Public with Science. He was a judge on the latest edition of BBC Robot Wars, a hugely popular technology show as well as involved with the launch of the BBC micro:bit coding initiative.