 Professor ANG Wei Tech | [Presentation Title] When will AI be Good Enough to Replace Clinicians in Motor Assessments? Prof. Ang is currently the Director of Robotics Research Center at the School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, NTU. He has served various academic and research leadership positions in NTU, including the Head of Division (2012-2014) and Associate Chair Research (2014-2017) at School of MAE, and as the founding director of the Rehabilitation Research Institute of Singapore (2016-2023), a joint collaboration by Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) and National Healthcare Group (NHG). Prof. Ang graduated from NTU with B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in Mechanical Engineering in 1997 and 1999 respectively, and from Carnegie Mellon University, USA with a PhD in Robotics in 2004. With a research portfolio that is as extensive as it is impactful, Prof Ang dedicates his expertise to advancing robotics technology across a spectrum of biomedical applications, including microsurgery, rehabilitation, assistive technology and AI-driven motion capture for medical and research use cases. He has won over S$50M of research funding, published over 200 peer reviewed papers and own more than 30 awarded and pending patents. Prof Ang's inventive prowess has catalyzed the commercialization of several patented technologies and the creation of spin-off companies. |
 Professor Geogre AUGUSTINE | [Presentation Title] Synapsins and Membrane Trafficking in Neurons Prof. Augustine is interested in molecular mechanisms of synaptic transmission and functional mapping of brain circuitry, in health and disease. He has published nearly 300 scientific articles, chapters and books, including the popular Neuroscience (Seventh Edition) textbook. Prof. Augustine is a Distinguished TLL Investigator at the Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory in Singapore. He previously founded the Center for Functional Connectomics at KIST in Korea and served as the Director of the Neuroscience & Mental Health Research Program at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine in Singapore. |
 Professor Paolo BONATO | [Presentation Title] Muscle Synergies Provide Insights into Motor Learning Mechanisms during Robot-assisted Gait Rehabilitation Prof. Bonato, Ph.D., is Director of the Motion Analysis Laboratory at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and an Associate Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School. He holds adjunct appointments at Boston University, MIT, and the MGH Institute of Health Professions. Prof. Bonato’s research focuses on rehabilitation applications of digital health and robotics. He served as the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation and later the IEEE Open Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology. He serves on editorial boards for leading journals, including the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics and Progress in Biomedical Engineering. His leadership roles include service as member of the IEEE EMBS AdCom, IEEE EMBS Vice President for Publications, and President of the International Society of Electrophysiology and Kinesiology. He holds a MS from Politecnico di Torino and a PhD from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. |
 Professor CONG Gao | [Presentation Title] Geospatial Entity Representation and City Foundation Models Prof. Cong is currently a Professor in the College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). He serves as the head of Division of Data Science, CCDS, NTU. He previously worked at Aalborg University, Denmark, Microsoft Research Asia, and the University of Edinburgh. His current research interests include Data+AI, spatial data management, spatial-temporal data mining, and recommendation systems. His citation in Google Scholar was over 23,000 with H-index 78. He received SIGIR’25 test of time award honourable mention award, and the best paper runner-up awards at the WSDM'20 and WSDM'22 conferences for two of his research papers. He served as a PC co-chair for ICDE’2022, the associate general chair of KDD’21, a PC co-chair for E&A track of VLDB 2014, and a PC vice-Chair for ICDE’18. He serves as an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) and IEEE TKDE. He is an ACM distinguished member. |
 Professor Reynold CHENG | [Presentation Title] AI for Social Goods Prof. Cheng is currently the Division Head and Professor (AI & Data Science), at the School of Computing and Data Science, in the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He is a Steering Committee Member of the HKU Musketeers Foundation Institute of Data Science. He is an academic advisor to the College of Professional and Continuing Education of Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He was an Associate Dean of Engineering in 2022-24. His research interests are in data science, big graph analytics and uncertain data management. Prof Cheng was named the AI 2000 Most Influential Scholar Honorable Mention in Database in 2023 to 2025. He received the ACM Distinguished Membership Award and the HKU Outstanding Research Student Supervisor Award in 2023. He was listed as the World’s Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University in 2022. He received the SIGMOD Research Highlights Reward 2020, HKICT Awards (2021, 2023), HKU Knowledge Exchange Award (2024), HKU Engineering Knowledge Exchange Award (2024, 2021), and HKU Engineering Best Teaching Award (2023, 2024), and HKU Outstanding Young Researcher Award 2011-12. He received the Universitas 21 Fellowship in 2011, and two HKPU Computing Performance Awards in 2006 and 2007. He was a PC co-chair of IEEE ICDE 2021. He is on the editorial board of PVLDB, ACM TSAS, IS, DAPD, and DSEJ. |
 Professor Michael HÄUSSER | [Presentation Title] Swaying Decisions with Light Prof. Häusser is Professor of Neuroscience at HKU and Director of the School of Biomedical Sciences. He received his PhD from Oxford University under the supervision of Julian Jack. He subsequently worked with Nobel Laureate Bert Sakmann at the Max-Planck-Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg and with Philippe Ascher at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He established his own laboratory at University College London in 1997 and became Professor of Neuroscience at UCL in 2001. His group is interested in understanding the cellular basis of neural computation in the mammalian brain using a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches, with a special focus on the role of dendrites. He helped to found the open-science collaboration International Brain Laboratory (internationalbrainlab.org), which aims to understand brain-wide mechanisms of decision-making. His group has developed a range of “neurotechnologies” for interrogating neural circuits, including “all-optical interrogation” which allows one to read and write neural activity at cellular resolution in the intact brain. These neurotechnologies may form the basis of novel brain-machine interfaces. |
 Professor Perry SHUM | [Presentation Title] Optical Fiber-Based Technologies & Applications Prof. Shum, 37th President of IEEE Photonics Societ, Director of Guangdong Key Laboratory of Integrated Optoelectronics Intellisense, IEEE Fellow, SPIE Fellow, OSA Fellow. He has published 500 academic journal papers with more than 20,000 citations, and H-index 70. He served as Director of the Network Technology Research Centre (NTRC), Photonics Centre of Excellence (OPTIMUS), and Centre for Optical Fibre Technology (COFT), and Associate Chair in charge of academic programs in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. During this period, a world-class fiber research/processing center was created, which enabling Singapore to have the ability to manufacture special fiber optics, special fiber lasers and sensors. He chaired several major international conferences, including CLEO-PR | OECC| PGC 2017; and initiator of several international conferences such as PGC, ICOCN, ICAIT, OGC, etc. He collaborates closely with universities and institutes worldwide. Two high-tech enterprises in the field of optoelectronics were established. |
 Professor WANG Qian | [Presentation Title] Medical Image Generation: Methods and Applications Prof. Wang is a tenured full professor and Vice Dean at the School of Biomedical Engineering, ShanghaiTech University. His research focuses on integrating machine learning and artificial intelligence with medical imaging to advance intelligent diagnosis, disease prognosis, personalized treatment, and translational medicine. He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers and his work has been cited over 15,000 times, reflecting his significant influence in the fields of biomedical engineering and AI-driven healthcare innovation. Through his leadership in research, teaching, and institutional collaboration, Prof. Wang continues to shape the future of intelligent medical imaging and translational medicine. |
 Professor ZHOU Shaohua | [Presentation Title] Traits and Trends of Medical Imaging AI: Universal and Foundation Models Prof. Zhou is dedicated to research on medical image computing, especially analysis and reconstruction, and its applications in real practices. He obtained his Bachelor's degree from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC)，Master's degree from National University of Singapore (NUS), and PhD degree from University of Maryland (UMD), College Park. Currently he is a distinguished professor and executive dean of School of Biomedical Engineering, Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, USTC and directs the Center for Medical Imaging, Robotics, Analytic Computing & Learning (MIRACLE). He is also an adjunct professor at Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), Shenzhen and was a principal expert and a senior R&D director at Siemens Healthcare Research. Prof. Zhou has published more than 350 book chapters and peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, registered over 400 granted patents, written and edited 8 research monographs. He is an enthusiastic contributor to professional communities and has been an executive treasurer and board member of the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) Society (19-24), an advisory board member of Medical Open Network for AI (MONAI) project (20-24), a program co-chair for MICCAI2020 conference, an editorial board member for IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (16-23), IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, npj Digital Medicine, and Medical Image Analysis, and an area chair for AAAI, CVPR, ICCV, MICCAI, and NeurIPS. He has won multiple awards including R&D 100 Award (known as Oscar of Invention), Siemens Inventor of the Year, UMD ECE Distinguished Alumni Award，Paper Finalist for MICCAI Young Scientist Award and ISBI Best Paper Award, and BMEF Editor of the Year. He has been elected as a fellow of AIMBE, IAMBE, IEEE, MICCAI, and NAI. |
 Professor ZHOU Xiaofang | [Presentation Title] AI-Native Databases Prof. Zhou is Otto Poon Professorship in Engineering and a Chair Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at HKUST, where he leads the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. His work covers database systems, data quality management, big data analytics, machine learning, and AI. He served as Program Committee Chair for IEEE ICDE 2013, ACM CIKM 2016, and PVLDB 2020, and was General Chair for ICDE 2025 and ACM Multimedia 2015. Prior to HKUST, he was a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Queensland, heading its Data Science discipline. He is a Global STEM Scholar of Hong Kong and a Fellow of IEEE. |
