EDS 2025

Serge Belongie

Professor of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen

Serge Belongie is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, where he also serves as the head of the Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence (P1). Previously, he was a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, an Associate Dean at Cornell Tech, and a member of the Visiting Faculty program at Google. His research interests include Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Augmented Reality, and Human-in-the-Loop Computing. He is also a co-founder of several companies including Digital Persona and Anchovi Labs. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the MIT Technology Review "Innovators Under 35" Award, the Helmholtz Prize, the Everingham Prize, and the Koenderink Prize for fundamental contributions to the Computer Vision community. He is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and serves on the board of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).

Petri Myllymäki

Professor of AI and Machine Learning, University of Helsinki

Petri Myllymäki is a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at the Department of Computer Science of University of Helsinki, Finland. He is a co-founder of several AI start-up companies (Sprint.ai, Ekahau, BayesIT, Cloud'N'Sci, Sightful, Etsimo), and has also been responsible of numerous applied research projects, and his industrial co-operation has led to a number of fielded applications and patents. Myllymäki is an Ellis Fellow at Ellis Unit Helsinki, and a member of the Finnish Academy of Technology and the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters. Currently the Director of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and the Vice-Director of the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence, the Finnish Flagship on AI, and is working as a member of the UN High-Level Advisory Body on AI, appointed by the UN Secretary General. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the AI, Data and Robotics PPP (ADRA) for the European Commission, the Board of Directors of the National IT Center for Science hosting the LUMI supercomputer, a member of the National Committee for Research Data Management, a member of the national expert group on EU Horizon Cluster 4, and a member of the national expert group on Digitalization.

Nuria Oliver

Director, ELLIS Unit Alicante Foundation

Nuria Oliver is Director of the ELLIS unit Alicante Foundation, known as The Institute of Humanity-centric AI. She is co-founder and vice-president of ELLIS. Previously, she was Chief Scientific Advisor to the Vodafone Institute, Director of Data Science Research at Vodafone, Scientific Director at Telefónica and researcher at Microsoft Research. She holds a PhD from the Media Lab at MIT and an Honorary Doctorate from the University Miguel Hernández. She is also Chief Data Scientist at DataPop Alliance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she held an honorary position as Commissioner to the President of the Valencian Government on AI and Data Science against COVID-19. She advises several universities, governments and companies. She is the only independent board member of the Spanish Supervisory Agency of AI (AESIA), the Spanish representative in the high-level advisory panel to the International Report on AI Safety and the Chair of the Transparency section in writing the Code of Practice for GPAI models in the AI Act. She is an IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, EurAI Fellow, ELLIS Fellow and elected permanent member of the Royal Academy of Engineering of Spain. She is also a member of CHI Academy, the Academia Europaea and corresponding member at the Academy of Engineering of Mexico. She is well known for her work in computational models of human behavior, human computer-interaction, mobile computing and big data for social good. Named inventor of 40 patents. She has received many awards, including the MIT TR100 Young Innovator Award (2004), Spanish National Computer Science Award (2016), Engineer of the Year (2018), Valencian Medal to Business and Social Impact (2018), Data Scientist of the Year (2019), Jaume I Award in New Technologies (2021), the Abie Technology Leadership Award by AnitaB.org (2021) and the Hypatia Award (2023). According to Research.com, she is the Spanish female computer scientist with largest scientific impact (2022-2024). Author of the book "Artificial Intelligence, naturally", published by the Spanish Ministry to Economy and Digital Society (2019). She is passionate about the potential of AI to be a driver for Social Good.

Tomasz Trzciński

Director of the ELLIS Unit Warsaw, Full Professor, Warsaw University of Technology

Tomasz Trzciński (DSc, WUT'20; PhD, EPFL'14; MSc, UPC/PoliTo'10) is a Full Professor at Warsaw University of Technology, where he leads a Computer Vision Lab. ELLIS Fellow and Director of the ELLIS Unit Warsaw. He is also a Computer Vision Group Leader at IDEAS NCBR, a publicly-funded Polish Center for AI. He was an Associate Professor at Jagiellonian University of Krakow in years 2020-2023, and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University in 2017 and at Nanyang Technological University in 2019. Previously, he worked at Google in 2013, Qualcomm in 2012 and Telefónica in 2010. He frequently serves as a reviewer and area chair in major computer science conferences (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICML) and journals (TPAMI, IJCV, CVIU). He is a Senior Member of IEEE, member of ELLIS Society and director of ELLIS Unit Warsaw, member of the ALICE Collaboration at CERN and an expert of National Science Centre and Foundation for Polish Science. He is a Chief Scientist at Tooploox and a co-founder of Comixify, a technology startup focused on using machine learning algorithms for video editing. Research interests: computer vision (SLAM, visual search), efficient machine learning (deep learning, generative models, continual learning, conditional computations), representation learning (binary descriptors).

Piotr Sankowski

Professor, Institute of Informatics, University of Warsaw

Piotr Sankowski is a professor at the Institute of Informatics at the University of Warsaw, where he obtained his habilitation in 2009 and his PhD in computer science in 2005. His research interests focus on the practical applications of algorithms, ranging from economic applications and learning data structures to parallel algorithms for data science. In 2009, he also earned a PhD in physics in the field of solid-state theory. He is ELLIS Fellow at the ELLIS Unit Warsaw. Prof. Sankowski is the first Polish researcher to receive four grants from the European Research Council (ERC): the ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant (2010), the ERC Proof of Concept Grant (2015, 2023), and the ERC Consolidator Grant (2017). He is a co-founder of the spin-off company MIM Solutions and was the first CEO of the company IDEAS NCBR.

Dario Floreano

Director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, EPFL

Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Between 2010 and 2022, he was the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics, a research program that graduated almost 200 PhD students and more than 100 postdocs, funded two professorships at EPFL and University of Zurich, created the EPFL Master's program in Robotics and the annual Swiss Robotics Day, helped launch Cybathlon, and generated more than 15 robotics spinoffs that created several hundred jobs. Prof. Floreano holds an M.A. in Vision, an M.S. in Neural Computation, and a PhD in Robotics. He has held research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, at Caltech/JPL, and at Harvard University. His research interests are Robotics and A.I. at the convergence of biology and engineering. Prof. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics, aerial robotics, and soft robotics. He served in numerous advisory boards and committees, including the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission, the World Economic Forum Agenda Council, the International Society of Artificial Life, the International Neural Network Society, and in the editorial committee of several scientific journals. In addition, he helped spinning off three drone companies (senseFly.com, Flyability.com, Elythor.com) and a non-for-profit portal on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub.org).

Pau Rodríguez López

Research Scientist, Apple Machine Learning Research

Pau Rodríguez López is a research scientist at Apple Machine Learning Research, adjunct professor at Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and ELLIS member. His main research interest is on machine learning methods that generalize with fewer labeled data, closer to how humans learn. Previously, he was a research lead at ServiceNow Research and a Research Scientist at Element AI. He did a PhD on Deep Learning and Computer Vision at CVC-UAB. Before, he finished the Master of Artificial Intelligence at KU Leuven. He would like AI to solve the most important problems of humanity.

Davide Scaramuzza

Professor of Robotics and Perception, University of Zurich

Davide Scaramuzza is a Professor of Robotics and Perception at the University of Zurich and currently a distinguished visiting scientist at NASA JPL. He did his Ph.D. at ETH Zurich, a postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania, and was a visiting professor at Stanford University. His research focuses on autonomous, agile microdrone navigation using standard and event-based cameras. He pioneered autonomous, vision-based navigation of drones, which inspired the navigation algorithm of the NASA Mars helicopter and many drone companies. He contributed significantly to visual-inertial state estimation, vision-based agile navigation of microdrones, and low-latency, robust perception with event cameras, which were transferred to many products, from drones to automobiles, cameras, AR/VR headsets, and mobile devices. In 2022, his team demonstrated that an AI-powered drone could outperform the world champions of drone racing, a result published in Nature and considered the first time an AI defeated a human in the physical world. He is a consultant for the United Nations on disaster response and disarmament. He has won many awards, including an IEEE Technical Field Award, the elevation to IEEE Fellow, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, a European Research Council Consolidator Grant, a Google Research Award, two NASA TechBrief Awards, and many paper awards. In 2015, he co-founded Zurich-Eye, today Meta Zurich, which developed the head-tracking software of the world-leading virtual reality headset, the Meta Quest, which sold 25 million units worldwide. In 2020, he co-founded SUIND, which builds autonomous drones for precision agriculture. Many aspects of his research have been featured in the media, such as The New York Times, The Economist, and Forbes.

Ewa Szczurek

Associate professor, Institute of Informatics, University of Warsaw

Ewa Szczurek is the co-director of the Institute of AI for Health at Helmholtz Munich, Germany (from Feb 2024), and leads joint labs at Helmholtz Munich and at the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics of the University of Warsaw, Poland. She was a visiting associate professor at Northwestern University in the United States (2023) and a visiting fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Bielefeld, Germany (2016). She holds Master degrees in computer science from the University of Warsaw, Poland and Uppsala University, Sweden. She obtained her doctoral degree from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin (2011), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in Switzerland at ETH Zurich. Prof. Szczurek was a recipient of the distinction, scientific and didactic awards from the Rector of the University of Warsaw, as well as ETH Zurich and IMPRS fellowships for her postdoctoral and doctoral research. She acts as a program committee member for the ISMB and RECOMB-CCB conferences, as well as associate editor for Genome Biology. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence, in particular probabilistic graphical models and deep generative models, and their applications in computational medicine. Her specific applications include oncology, pulmonology and the AI-driven design of antimicrobial peptides, a work for which she was recently awarded the ERC Consolidator grant.

Serge Belongie
Professor of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen

Petri Myllymäki
Professor of AI and Machine Learning, University of Helsinki

Nuria Oliver
Director, ELLIS Unit Alicante Foundation