Doug is a software technologist with a lifelong passion for eliciting emotion with technology. After convincing his parents that his Atari 800 was sentient at age 10, he was hooked on molding bleeding-edge AI technologies into emotionally engaging experiences. Since then, he has researched and developed technologies and systems for emotion guided AI music composition, expressive performance-driven facial animation, dynamic wrinkle simulation, 3D face reconstruction and animation from consumer cameras, face expression recognition, 3D personalized avatars, and AI driven conversational digital characters. Recently, Doug turned his AI passion to his hobby farm, successfully controlling the crow volume of his roosters with a reinforcement learning crow inhibition system that inadvertently attracted a pack of coyotes to his yard.

Doug currently runs Disney Research Imagineering, leading an incredible team of passionate research scientists and engineers in AI/ML, robotics, perception, and immersive display technologies, defining the next generation of innovative tools, processes, and experiences for Disney.

Adrien Gaidon is the Head of Machine Learning (ML) at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) and an Adjunct Lecturer at Stanford. His research focuses on scaling up ML for robot autonomy, spanning Scene and Behavior Understanding, Simulation for Deep Learning, 3D Computer Vision, and Self-Supervised Learning. Adrien has over 50 publications in ML and Computer Vision, with a practical impact in areas like autonomous driving.

Pablos is a hacker, inventor and technology futurist with a unique ability to distill complex technology into practical tools. Always building the future, his projects include cryptocurrency in the 1990s; AI for stock market trading; building spaceships at Blue Origin for Jeff Bezos; the world’s smallest PC and 3D printers at Makerbot. Pablos helped start the Intellectual Ventures Lab for Nathan Myhrvold to support a wide range of invention projects, including a brain surgery tool; a machine to suppress hurricanes; a nuclear reactor powered by nuclear waste; and a machine that can shoot mosquitoes out of the sky with lasers – part of an impact invention effort to eradicate malaria with Bill Gates. A member of the most prolific team of inventors in the United States, Pablos has over 70 patents.

A world-renowned expert in 3D Printing, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Robotics, Automated Manufacturing, & Cryptocurrency, Pablos has contributed to visions for the future of urban transportation, entertainment, education, energy, manufacturing, health care, food delivery, sensor networks, payment systems & cloud computing.

Matt Mason has been working in AI and Robotics for 45 years. He earned a PhD at the MIT AI Lab, then joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon in Computer Science and Robotics. For ten years he served as Director of the Robotics Institute (which includes NREC -- the National Robotics Engineering Center ). In 2014 he joined Berkshire Grey where he serves as Chief Scientist. In 2021 Berkshire Grey went public -- the first robotics company to go public since iRobot 16 years earlier.

Mason is a Fellow of the AAAI, the IEEE, and the ACM. He is a winner of the System Development Foundation Prize, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s Pioneer Award, and the IEEE Technical Field Award in Robotics and Automation.

Kevin brings deep computer graphics experience having built and led a team within Apple's Special Projects Group focused on autonomous systems simulation. Previously, he architected and implemented procedural content systems for Microsoft Game Studios and contributed to academy award winning films at Pixar Animation Studios.

Dr. Stone is the founder and director of the Learning Agents Research Group (LARG) within the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin, as well as associate department chair and Director of Texas Robotics.

Dr. Stone was a co-founder of Cogitai, Inc. and he is now the Executive Director of Sony AI America.

Dr. Stone’s research interest in AI is understanding how we can best create complete intelligent agents. He considers adaptation, interaction, and embodiment to be essential capabilities of such agents. Thus, his research focuses mainly on machine learning, multiagent systems, and robotics. He believes the most exciting research topics are those inspired by challenging real-world problems. He believes that complete successful research includes both precise, novel algorithms and fully implemented and rigorously evaluated applications. His application domains have included robot soccer, autonomous bidding agents, autonomous vehicles, and human-interactive agents.