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Biographies

Andrea Cavallaro Full Professor, EPFL Prof. Andrea Cavallaro is a Full Professor at EPFL and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, the International Association for Pattern Recognition, and the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems. His research focuses on machine learning for multimodal perception, computer vision, machine listening, and information privacy. He has received numerous awards, including a Research Fellowship with British Telecommunications, the Royal Academy of Engineering Teaching Prize, a Turing Fellowship, and four paper awards. He also served as an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer. Andrea has published over 300 papers, a monograph on video tracking, and three edited books covering topics such as intelligent multimedia, multimedia content analysis, and multi-camera networks.
Avinash Aggarwal Telecommunication Service Officer, Trustworthy Artficial Intelligence, Information Technology and Broadcasting Avinash Agarwal is an Indian Telecommunications Service (ITS) Officer with a 32-year career in Telecommunications, Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence, Information Technology, and Broadcasting. He has held various key positions within the Government of India. He brings deep multilateral experience and a proven track record of building consensus among Member States, with successful leadership roles in both APT preparatory groups and ITU, making him well-suited for leading APT preparations for the ITU Plenipotentiary process.
Craig Merry Independent Researcher and Developer, USA Craig Merry is an IT analyst and independent developer based in Northern California. He builds open-source robotics and AI agent tooling, including low-cost Raspberry Pi rover and manipulator platforms. His current work focuses on making embodied AI safe by design: bounding what a machine can physically do regardless of the model controlling it, and making that bound testable by anyone.
Emily Chen Dexmal, China Emily Chen is a long-time open source practitioner, technology leader, and community organizer. She is founder of GNOME.Asia and Kaiyuanshe. She served as a Board Director of the GNOME Foundation in 2010, contributed to Mozilla, Mentor of Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and served as a TOC Mentor at the OpenAtom Foundation. More recently, she initiated the RoboChallenge platform and committee, one of the pioneering large-scale real-world robot evaluation benchmarks for embodied intelligence, dedicated to advancing open, transparent, and reproducible assessment of embodied AI systems. With more than 20 years of experience in the technology industry, Emily has held positions at SUN, Oracle, and Microsoft. Her expertise spans open source governance, cloud computing, AI infrastructure, and embodied intelligence. She is the recipient of a U.S. patent in Artificial Intelligence and is a co-author of O’Reilly’s book Beautiful Testing
Hongki Cha Director, ETRI (Korea) Mr. Hongki CHA is the youngest Special Fellow at ETRI, specializing in international standardization for automated driving systems. He develops standards and formulates strategies and policies, currently serving as the Sponsor for SAE J3016, Associate Rapporteur for ITU-T Q10/21, and Chair of ASTAP EG P&R. He has published several international standards and represented South Korea at various ITU Plenipotentiary Conferences and World Telecommunication Standardization Assemblies, earning three Ministerial Awards for Excellence. Fluent in Korean, English, French, and Chinese, he is a proud husband and father of twin boys.
Guangdong Hou Vice President of R&D, Beijing Tashan Technology Co., LTD Hou Guangdong joined Beijing Ta Shan Technology Co., Ltd. in 2024. He oversees the development and product implementation of the company’s artificial intelligence technology system. Focusing on distributed brain‑inspired tactile‑sensing chips and tactile‑intelligence solutions, he is in charge of the top‑level design, iterative upgrade and engineering deployment of AI algorithms, and fully drives deep integration of AI technologies into the R&D workflow across all product lines. He has participated in the formulation of national and industry standards, including Technical Specification for Humanoid Robot Simulation and Test Platform, Technical Requirements for Humanoid Robots — Part 2: Environmental Perception, Humanoid Robots — General Fundamentals — Technical Specification for Training Field Construction, and Humanoid Robots — General Fundamentals — Requirements for Training Data Management.Published multiple academic papers and was selected as a Best Paper Finalist at the international conference SMC.His research focuses on the intersection of embodied intelligence and tactile perception. Leveraging the company’s leading core tactile‑sensing technologies, he develops multi‑modal perception models and embodied models fused with tactile information. His work addresses performance bottlenecks of conventional multi‑modal models in physical‑interaction scenarios, and meets stringent requirements for task success rates in industrial‑grade, high‑reliability applications. He accelerates the industrial translation of cutting‑edge technologies out of laboratories. Based on the company’s self‑developed brain‑inspired tactile‑sensing chips, he builds a foundational tool platform for the development and validation of distributed embodied neural‑network models.
Hyewon Song CTO, WHATs LAB Hyewon Song is the CTO of WHATs LAB, a Korean robotics technology company developing wearable hand interfaces for Physical AI and embodied intelligence. Her work focuses on capturing high-fidelity human hand motion and interaction data in real-world environments for robot learning, teleoperation, and human demonstration data collection. She currently leads the collection of hand motion data directly from industrial environments, where complex manipulation tasks often involve occlusion, tools, machinery, and physical contact that are difficult to capture reliably with vision alone. Her work focuses on building scalable multimodal data interfaces that combine wearable sensing, vision, and tactile information for advanced robotic manipulation and embodied AI.
Kei Kawamura Research Manager, KDDI Corporation Kei Kawamura, Ph.D., joined KDDI in 2010 and has served as General Manager of the XR Department at KDDI Research, Inc. since 2024. He has been deeply involved in standardizing HEVC, VVC, and V-DMC within JCT-VC, JVET, and MPEG-3DGH. Since 2025, he has served as Vice-Chair of ITU-T SG21 and Chair of ITU-T WP1/21. His current work and research interests encompass video and dynamic mesh coding, immersive XR media, and broadband cable transmission. He is a member of IEEE, IEICE, and ITE.
Linchao Zhu Zhejiang University & Jinglianwen Linchao Zhu is a Research Professor at the College of AI, Zhejiang University. He is also the Chief Scientist at Jinglianwen. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Technology Sydney in 2019. His research interests include foundation models, AI simulation, Embodied AI. Dr. Zhu received the inaugural Google Research Scholar Award in 2021 and was selected for the AAAI 2025 New Faculty Highlights. He has authored more than 80 papers in leading journals and conferences, including IEEE TPAMI, NeurIPS, and CVPR. He has won eight international competitions in action recognition, egocentric video understanding, and multi-agent behavior modeling. He has also served as an Area Chair for major international conferences, including NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, and ECCV.
Prabhat Kumar Mishra Assistant Professor, IIT Kharagpur Dr. Prabhat Kumar Mishra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Artificial Intelligence, IIT Kharagpur, working at the intersection of control theory and AI for autonomous systems. He received his PhD from IIT Bombay, spent a year at EPFL as a Swiss Government Excellence Fellow, and was a postdoctoral researcher at UIUC and MIT. He leads the ANRF-funded project IQuaP: Intelligent Quadrupeds for Police.
Rongwei Ren Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center (China) Head of the Safety Group Humanoid Robot and Embodied AI Standardization Technical Committee, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). Led China’s first batch of national humanoid robot standards Established and led the Motion Control subsection as Convener. Led China’s first embodied AI data collection industry standard Convened over 100 industry enterprises for data mutual recognition. Published China’s first humanoid robot intelligence classification standard. Previous Roles: Former WG6 Working Group Leader, Global O-RAN Alliance; Former OPNFV Working Group Leader, Linux Foundation; Led real-time acceleration open-source plans for wireless cloud platforms; Contributor to ETSI NFV IFA001-003 standards.
Shin-Gak Kang Special Research Fellow, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Republic of Korea Shin-Gak Kang is a Special Research Fellow of ETRI, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Republic of Korea. He received B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electronics engineering and information technology from Chungnam National University, Daejeon, Korea in 1984, 1987, and 1998, respectively. He joined ETRI in 1984 and served as the Head of the Standards Research Division, including open source, as Assistant Vice President of ETRI. He also served as an Adjunct Professor of ETRI School of University of Science and Technology in Korea from 2008 to 2023. He has actively participated in many international standardization activities of many SDOs including ITU-T SG 7, SG 8, SG 17, SG 11, SG 13, SG 16, SG 20, GSC, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 6, IETF and IEEE, as Rapporteur, Convenor, Editor, and major contributor since his first joining to ITU-T SG 8 meeting in 1988. He served as ITU-T SG11 Vice-Chair and its WP Chair from 2013 to 2021. He served as SG16 Vice-Chair and its WP Chair from 2022 to 2024. He served as the Chair of the ITU FG-MV from 2023 to June 2024 and currently leading metaverse standardization activities as the Co-Chair of the JCA-MV. He also served as the Convenor of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 6/WG 7 on Future Network from 2004 to April 2026 and has been leading relevant standardization activities as the Chair of JTC 1/SC 6 since 2025. He is currently serving as Vice-Chair of ITU-T SG21, Co-chair of WP4/21 for the multimedia technologies including metaverse. He was appointed as the Vice-Chair of newly established ITU-T Focus Group on Embodied AI for multimedia technologies (FG-EAI) in February 2026. He is actively working on foundational architecture and terminology as an FG-EAI/WG1 Chair.
Stefano Polidori Counsellor at the International Telecommunication Union Stefano is a Counsellor at the International Telecommunication Union and responsible for the technical secretariat of ITU-T Study Group 21 “Technologies for multimedia, content delivery and cable television”, including the recent Focus Group on Embodied AI for multimedia technologies (FG-EAI). He is also responsible for the Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) activities, including the Symposium on the Future Networked Car. Stefano is the ITU representative to the European Multi Stakeholder Platform on ICT Standardization at the European Commission. After few years in the private sector, joined the ITU in 2004 covering various positions including Coordinator for ITU Kaleidoscope academic conference, Counsellor for Study Group 9 “broadband cable and TV”, and Study Group 11 “Signalling, protocols and test specifications”. Stefano holds a Master in Electronic Engineering from the University of Rome, Italy and a Master of Science in mobile communication from Aalborg University, Denmark.
Tony Zeng Standard Director of Optical Access of Huawei, China Tony is now the standard director of optical access in Huawei Optical Business Product Line, leading optical standard group for ITU-T SG15/21, BBF, CCSA TC6, etc. He actively participates in various standard areas of optical network, e.g. access & in-premises networking technologies, AI in Broadband, Embodied AI, network management, IoT protocols.. He is now the Associate Rapporteur of ITU-T Q3/SG15, Chair of WG5 of FG-EAI of ITU-T SG21, Director of Service Requirement Work Area of BBF and Chair of communication group of WG2 MIIT TC8 EAI.
Weimin Zhang CAICT, China Ms Weimin Zhang is a Senior Engineer and Deputy Director of the Embodied Intelligence and Robotics Department at the AI Institute of CAICT, as well as Co-Chair of WG4 (Whole Machine and Systems), MIIT Technical Committee on Humanoid Robots and Embodied Artificial Intelligence Standardization. She is also an expert member of the Embodied Artificial Intelligence Working Group of AIIA. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence standardization and industrial research, with particular expertise in embodied AI, AIGC, and AI benchmark testing. She has led the release of the Embodied Artificial Intelligence Development Report (2024) and (2025), and has spearheaded the development of more than ten industry and international standards. She possesses extensive experience in ITU international standardization and AI industry standards development. She also serves as an editor of ITU-T Recommendations F.748.11 and F.748.66, as well as draft Recommendation F.BA-EAI.
Yuchen Xiao Chief Scientiist, Unitree Robotics Yuchen Xiao holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Northeastern University, USA, and currently serves as Chief Scientist for Embodied AI at Unitree. He also serves as Vice Chair of ITU-T FG-EAI WG3. At Unitree, he leads the research and development of embodied foundation models for general-purpose humanoid robots. He has led the release of six embodied foundation model advances, including UnifoLM-WLA-1.0, UnifoLM-X2-1.0, and UnifoLM-OminiA-0.3, as well as a world-leading whole-body teleoperation and data collection platform for humanoid robots, providing large-scale, high-quality data to support research and development in General Humanoid Intelligence (GHI). Before returning to China in 2024, he served as a Senior AI Research Scientist at JPMorgan Chase in the United States, focusing on foundation models, reinforcement learning, and multi-agent systems. He has led or contributed to 25 R&D projects, including national-level initiatives, with combined R&D funding exceeding RMB 500 million. He has also served as a senior program committee member and reviewer for leading international conferences, including IJCAI, AAMAS, NeurIPS, ICML, and ICRA.
Yonah Welker Independent Visiting Technologist, Evaluator Visiting Technologist in Embodied and Human-Centered Systems (independent, 2018–present). Evaluator, Rapporteur and Quality Controller for deep tech innovation and standardization programs, including EU Horizon and EIT/EIC-related initiatives. Contributor to OECD and other repositories of public technologies, and to frameworks, groups and reports encompassing public systems, data spaces, local digital twins, IoT-cloud-edge continuum projects, and critical digital capacities. Former Advisor to the Ministry of AI, and curator of the Global AI Summits, which led to signed MOUs, declarations, and infrastructure investments, with further involvement in technology projects, launches, and policy consultations across EMEA.
Yu Wang Professor at Department of Electronic Engineering Tsinghua University Yu Wang is the tenured professor at the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University and the Department Chair (2020.1 – 2026.1). As the IEEE Fellow, his research interests include energy-efficient AI circuit and system, SW/HW co-design, intelligent multi-agent system, and RL algorithm and infra. He has published over 90 journals (64 IEEE/ACM journals) and 270 conference papers in the areas of AI algorithm, computer architecture, EDA, VLSI Design, and Embedded Systems with the Google Scholar citation over 35,000. He has received 5 best paper awards and 13 best paper nominations. Yu Wang has been an active volunteer in the design automation, VLSI, and FPGA conferences. Yu Wang is also a successful entrepreneur. He co-founded Deephi, a deep learning solution provider acquired by Xilinx (now AMD) in 2018. He is the promoter of INFINIGENCE, world leading Agentic AI Infrastructure provider to empower AGI adoption across all industrials. Yu Wang and the Department had hosted the ITU visit on October 26th 2024. He had also visited ITU ASP Regional Office in February 2026 to discuss the collaboration between ITU and Tsinghua University together with companies like Infinigence.
Yuntao Wang CAICT, China Professor-Level Senior Engineer, Deputy Chief Engineer of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, Artificial Intelligence Institute. He is also, Rapporteur of ITU-T Q5/21, and Chair of Focus Group on Embodied AI for Multimedia Technologies.

Richard Zhou COO, Motphys Richard Zhou is COO of Motphys, with extensive experience spanning artificial intelligence, embodied intelligence, simulation, product strategy, and technology operations. He combines deep technical expertise in machine learning, large language models, and data mining with a proven track record of building products and organizations at scale. Richard previously held senior product leadership roles at Microsoft, Tencent, and NewsBreak. At Tencent, he led the end-to-end development of Tencent Sports, establishing it as China’s leading sports platform, and directed the development of products for major international sporting events. He specializes in translating frontier AI and simulation technologies into robust products, scalable businesses, and sustained market leadership