Course Director
Lars Kunze is a Departmental Lecturer in Robotics in the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) and the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. At ORI, he leads the Cognitive Robotics Group (CRG).
Lars is also a Stipendiary Lecturer in Computer Science at Christ Church, a Programme Fellow of the Assuring Autonomy International Programme (AAIP), and an Editor of the German Journal of Artificial Intelligence (KI Journal, Springer).
His areas of expertise lie in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). His goal is to enable robots to understand their surroundings, to act autonomously, and to explain their own behaviour in meaningful human terms. To this end, his research concerns the design and development of fundamental AI techniques for autonomous robot systems. He focusses on the combination of knowledge representation, reasoning, machine learning, and robot perception; motivated by applications in complex, real-world environments.
Lars studied Cognitive Science (BSc, 2006) and Computer Science (MSc, 2008) at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and partly at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
He received his PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 2014. During his PhD, Lars worked on methods for naive physics and common sense reasoning in the context of everyday robot manipulation. He contributed to several national, European and international projects including RoboHow, RoboEarth, and the PR2 Beta program.
In May 2013, Lars was appointed as a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Robotics Lab at the School of Computer Science at Birmingham University. Here he worked on qualitative spatio-temporal models for perception planning and knowledge-enabled perception, contributing to the European research projects STRANDS and ALOOF.
He was a visiting researcher in the JSK Lab at the University of Tokyo, Japan (Summer 2011) and the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory at Tufts University, US (Spring 2015).
Course Director
Based in London, Ajit's work work spans research, entrepreneurship and academia relating to artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT).
He is the course director of the course: Artificial Intelligence: Cloud and Edge Implementations. Besides this, he also conducts the University of Oxford courses: Developing AI Applications and Computer Vision.
Ajit works as a data scientist through his company feynlabs - focusing on building innovative early stage AI prototypes for domains such as cybersecurity, robotics and healthcare.
Besides the University of Oxford, Ajit has also conducted AI courses in the London School of Economics (LSE), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and as part of the The Future Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
He is also currently working on a book to teach AI using mathematical foundations at high school level.
Ajit was listed in the top 30 influencers for IoT for 2017 along with Amazon, Bosch, Cisco, Forrester and Gartner by the German insurance company Munich Re.
Ajit publishes extensively on KDnuggets and Data Science Central.
He was recently included in top 16 influencers (Data Science Central), Top 100 blogs (KDnuggets), Top 50 (IoT central), and 19th among the top 50 twitter IoT influencers (IoT Institute).
His PhD research is based on AI and Affective Computing (how AI interprets emotion).
Tutor
Ayşe Mutlu is a data scientist working on Azure AI and devops technologies. Based in London, Ayşe’s work involves building and deploying Machine Learning and Deep Learning models using the Microsoft Azure framework (Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines).
She enjoys coding in Python and contributing to Open Source Initiatives in Python.
Tutor
Rajkumar Bondugula has earned a M.S. and a Ph.D. from University of Missouri-Columbia, USA, both in Computer Science with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence (AI). He has co-authored 20 peer-reviewed scientific publications, a book titled "Application of Fuzzy Logic in Bioinformatics", 16 patent applications and his work has been cited over 250 times in the academic literature. He is a frequent guest lecturer in multiple universities, an executive faculty at Emory University Continuing Education, and a frequent podcast guest speaker. In nearly two decades, he has professionally used AI for computer vision, computational biology, e-commerce, social intelligence, Fintech and Telecom. In addition, he is also an expert in natural language processing and distributed computing.
He joins us from Verizon, where he is currently an AI Luminary Scientist and Data Science Fellow. He leads Digital Twin initiatives and is responsible for AI and Simulation modeling aspects of Digital Twins. In addition, he also leads the development of Cognitive Classifiers used for corporate data management.
Before Verizon, Raj was a Distinguished Scientist and a Fellow at Equifax. He was responsible for leading a team of Data Scientists and Big Data Engineers to develop innovative solutions to hard problems that lead to organizational growth in 3-5 years. Prior to Equifax, he did a brief stint at a startup called Shoutlet, established data science practice at Home Depot, lead a machine learning team at Sears Holdings Corporation and was a scientist at Department of Defense Biotechnology High Performance Computing Software Applications Institute.
Tutor
Lecturer in Engineering Education, King’s College London
Francesco is a Lecturer in the Department of Engineering at King’s College London, where he teaches interdisciplinary design and mechatronics. He previously worked in the Education Group at MathWorks and provided consultancy services to educators and researchers on the use of MATLAB & Simulink. Francesco has broad expertise in Simulation and Artificial Intelligence, with application to Robotics & Control systems, signal processing and IoT. He also holds a PhD in Engineering from the University of Cambridge for his work in experimental fluid dynamics and a MEng in Civil Engineering from Imperial College London.
Tutor
Keith Myers is an artist, professional speaker, and the creative director of AVimmerse, who have produced immersive content for clients including: The NHS; BBC Arts; The Wildlife Trust; Liverpool John Moores University; and Gymshark.
He also teaches immersive media production techniques and has worked with institutions in the UK, including The University of Manchester, and Manchester Metropolitan University. In addition, he has taken an active role in Virtual Reality Labs across the North-West region for the last 4 years, where he has shared production techniques, design approaches, and led teams of artists to fulfil briefs.
His tech talks focus on immersive production, critical analysis of a new medium, and immersive storytelling techniques. He has spoken at Leeds Digital Festival, Tech Week Humber, and the annual AR/VR conference in Manchester.
Tutor
Phil is Group Product Manager for XR at Unity. Phil has been working to make it easier for creators to tell stories in XR, currently overseeing XR platform integrations, frameworks, interaction workflows, simulation-based MARS workflows, and runtime authoring features.
Prior to Unity, Phil worked at Netflix and Audi/Volkswagen.
Tutor
Dr David Mc Kee, Chair of the Open Source, Standards, and Platform Stacks at the Digital Twin Consortium / CEO, CTO and founder, Slingshot Simulations
Dr David McKee is the CEO, CTO and founder at Slingshot Simulations, an enterprise fellow at the Royal Academy of Engineering, and chairs the technology working groups at the OMG Digital Twin Consortium. As CTO at Slingshot since 2019 David leads the company’s work on Digital Twins working across Cloud, IoT, and machine learning platforms.
At the Digital Twin Consortium David jointly lead the work on standardising a Digital Twin definition and continues to lead the Technology, Terminology, and Taxonomy working group. He is also responsible for leading the Open Source Initiative and a collaborative effort including Microsoft, Bentley Systems, DELL, and NTT to define a reference architecture for building Digital Twin Systems.
Before forming Slingshot David was a senior researcher at the University of Leeds building these systems for partners including the likes of Jaguar Land Rover and AliCloud.
Tutor
Dirk Hartmann is a distinguished scientist, intrapreneur, and thought leader in the field of Simulation and Digital Twins.
Among many distinctions, he has been awarded the prestigious Wernervon-Siemens Top Innovator by the Siemens CEO and CTO for generating novel products and services cross product lines through his innovations.
In his career he took several leading roles in research, innovation, and development including a lead of a 2-digit million Siemens R&D program and the technical leadership for the Simulation & Digital Twin field at Siemens Technology.
He is a passionate mentor, teacher, and supervisor for the next generation of innovators and experts exploring jointly promising Digital Twin solutions for the industry.
Beyond this, he is a member of several high-level international conference committees and associations like EU-MATH driving industrial mathematics both on a national, European, and international level.
Tutor
With over 10 years of mixed reality and real-time development experience, David Menard is an industry-leader in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) when it comes to enterprise applications.
At Unity Technologies, David oversees the technical developmentof Unity Reflect, which enables AEC (Architecture, Construction, Engineering) companies to create real-time experiences in augmented reality and virtual reality.
Prior to joining Unity, David led mixed-reality R&D efforts at the enterprise software giant, Autodesk.
Tutor
John Alexander is a Sr. Machine Teaching Advocate on the Microsoft Project Bonsai team.
He sat in Kirk's Chair on the bridge, recorded cartoon pilots as part of a voice ensemble cast, is the co-creator of the "Geek" t-shirt (found at most Microsoft conferences), and was Facebook friends with Patrick Swayze.
John has a passion for designing and building accessible experiences using AI coupled with vision, voice, touch, and virtual/mixed reality.
In a previous life, he was the co-founder of a digital agency and consultancy, and also had the honor of being a Microsoft regional director for 19 years.
In the previous, previous life before that, John co-founded the largest technical blogging community in the world, Geekswithblogs.Net, before selling it several years ago.
He also built music chart applications for Billboard Magazine used by "American Top 40", and architected a highly scalable Mutual Funds Trading SOA-based platform used non-stop the last 18 years to process billions of dollars in transactions.
A trainer since 1996, with 26 Microsoft product certifications, John has coached several teams of developers, leading one directly responsible for earning their organization a spot on CIO Magazine’s “Agile 100” list.
He’s co-authored three best-selling technical books, Microsoft Official Curriculum and co-hosted two technical focused podcasts.
Based in Kansas City, Missouri USA, John loves to paint, draw, game, do voiceovers, and spend time with his spouse and three children on all sorts of adventures.
Tutor
Center for Design Research, Stanford University
Didem cares about the future of the world and nature. She is a computer scientist with a PhD in mechatronics, which can give you an idea about how much she loves to talk about the future and emerging technologies. She is a data person, always finds a way to talk about how important it is to know your data, use it to make decisions, and at some point, expect her to talk about art, visualizations, and visual analytics. Didem is a person who does not hesitate to talk about inequalities and point out her ethical concerns. She dreams of a better world and actively works on improving inequalities regardless of their nature. She is an analytical thinker with a passion for design thinking, a researcher with a future perspective, an engineer who likes problems more than solutions, and a teacher who likes to play during lectures. She is a good reader, sailor, divemaster, photographer, and drone pilot.
Currently, Didem is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow on Human-centered and Sustainable Cyber-physical Systems at Stanford University. Her project focuses on intelligence, autonomy, and interoperability of cyber-physical systems. She uses data science, design thinking, future thinking, and systems thinking as guiding principles to design future intelligent and autonomous systems. The project is funded by European Commission's prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions which supports excellence in research and innovation. Prior to this project, she was at the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge as a research associate for several years. She has worked at the intersection of data science and engineering projects with a focus on the design and implementation of digital twins for cyber-physical systems. In addition to being an IEEE Senior Member, she also sits on the advisory board of several organisations and support their strategic development on topics related to responsible artificial intelligence/data science, sustainable technology and equal STEAM education activities for young women.
