Mark Cheung, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center (chair)

Mark Cheung is a Senior Staff Physicist at Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California. His scientific investigations take place at the intersection of research themes connecting the Sun with Earth, magnetic fields with plasmas, and machine learning with space physics. As principal investigator for the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly onboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory mission, various Heliophysics research grants, and mentor for the Frontier Development Lab, he works with teams of scientists and engineers who operate space telescopes, perform data mining and data analysis on terabyte- and petabyte-scale data archives, develop massively parallel numerical simulation codes, and apply machine learning techniques for scientific discovery and space exploration. Mark studied at the University of Adelaide, Australia and the University of Göttingen, Germany before moving to California in 2006. He is a recipient of the Otto Hahn Medal from the Max Planck Society and the Karen Harvey Prize from the American Astronomical Society.

Eric Dixon, Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center

Eric Dixon is the Research Science Manager for the Autonomy & Robotics department inside the Artificial Intelligence, Data Analytics and Exploitation (AIDAE) directorate of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center. He currently manages research projects focused on robotic in space assembly, Human-Machine trust-building within a team using a combination of communication and human behavior models to reason the benefits and costs of communicating information, and accordingly determine whether to share information on current states and plans, collaborative human-robot teaming to assemble structures, rover autonomous navigation in unknown environments, and developing algorithms for learning how to generate plans in real-time based on massive examples of planning in simulation for robust manipulation skill policies.

Terry Fong, NASA Ames Research Center

Terry Fong is NASA’s Senior Scientist for Autonomous Systems and leads a senior advisory team on autonomy in support of NASA’s aeronautics, robotic, and human exploration missions. Terry is also Chief Roboticist and former Director of the NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group. Terry previously served as Deputy Lead for the NASA Resource Prospector lunar rover and as project manager for the NASA Human Exploration Telerobotics project, which developed and tested advanced telerobotic systems on the International Space Station. Prior to working for NASA, Terry was the deputy leader of the Virtual Reality and Active Interfaces Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology / Lausanne. Before that, Terry was Vice President of Development for Fourth Planet, Inc., a developer of real-time visualization software. Terry has published more than 150 papers in space and field robotics, human-robot interaction, virtual reality, and planetary mapping. Terry has a B.S. and M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Animesh Garg, University of Toronto & Vector Institute

Animesh Garg is a CIFAR Chair Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and a Faculty Member at the Vector Institute where he leads the Toronto People, AI, and Robotics (PAIR) research group. He is affiliated with the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (courtesy) and UofT Robotics Institute, and is a Senior Researcher at Nvidia Research in ML for Robotics. Prior to this, Animesh earned a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and was a postdoc at the Stanford AI Lab. His research focuses on machine learning algorithms for perception and control in robotics. His work aims to build Generalizable Autonomy in robotics which involves a confluence of representations and algorithms for reinforcement learning, control, and perception. His work has received multiple Best Paper Awards (ICRA, IROS, Hamlyn Symposium, Neurips Workshop, ICML Workshop) and has been covered in the press (New York Times, IEEE Spectrum, VentureBeat, Nature, BBC).

Shashi Jain, Intel

Shashi Jain is an Innovation Manager in the Client Computing Group at Intel, focused on pathfinding and corporate innovation in IoT, Machine Learning and Virtual Reality. He has over 20 years of experience in business development, entrepreneurship, engineering integration, rapid prototyping, and community building. In his spare time, he teaches innovation and entrepreneurship to high school students through the TYE Oregon and runs the largest 3D Printing Meetup on the west coast. Shashi has a Masters in Electrical Engineering from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and MBA from Babson College.

Alison Lowndes, NVIDIA

After spending her first year with NVIDIA as a Deep Learning Solutions Architect, Alison is now responsible for NVIDIA’s Artificial Intelligence Developer Relations across the EMEA region. She is a mature graduate in Artificial Intelligence combining technical and theoretical computer science with a physics background & over 20 years of experience in international project management, entrepreneurial activities and the internet. She consults on a wide range of AI applications, including planetary defence with NASA, ESA & the SETI Institute and continues to manage the community of AI & Machine Learning researchers around the world, remaining knowledgeable in state of the art & sharing this around the globe.

James Parr, Trillium Technologies, Frontier Development Lab (FDL) (in partnership with NASA) & FDL Europe (ESA)

James is the founder and CEO of Trillium Technologies - a technology contractor that specialises in the application of emerging technologies to grand challenges, such as climate change, violent extremism, prevention strategies for cancer and obesity, deforestation mitigation, climate resilience and planetary defence from asteroids.

He is Executive Producer of FDL an AI research accelerator based in Silicon Valley in partnership with NASA and the SETI Institute and Director of FDL Europe, in partnership with ESA. He is also founder of the Open Space Agency (OSA) - which is dedicated to democratisation of space exploration through citizen science and open hardware.

He lives in London with his wife and twin daughters.

Florence Tan, NASA Science Mission Directorate

Florence Tan is the Deputy Chief Technologist for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters. She works with SMD’s Chief Technologist to survey and assess technology needs for NASA’s science divisions and serves as a liaison to the NASA Office of the Chief Technologist, other NASA mission directorates, as well as NASA centers. Previously, Florence worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) for 32 years as a lead electrical engineer, cognizant engineer, designer, manager, and instrument operator for NASA spaceflight projects. She has built and launched seven mass spectrometers to destinations including Mars, Saturn, Titan, and the Moon. Florence has received numerous awards including the 2012 NASA Medal for Exceptional Achievement, the 2013 Robert Goddard Award for Outreach, the 2014 Solar System Exploration Special Award Act, more than 10 NASA Group Achievement Awards, and numerous Goddard Special Act Awards and Goddard Peer Awards. Florence has made it a personal goal to promote science, technology, engineering and mathematics education, and she engages in outreach activities with students and the public to promote NASA science and technology advancements at least once per month. Florence holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Maryland, and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering and MBA in E-Commerce from Johns Hopkins University.