Conference Speakers

Dr. Kyoung Yul BAE is professor of information security at Sangmyung University and Chairman of KORAIL’s Information Security Committee. From 1999 to 2002, he served as Assistant Mayor of Seoul Metropolitan Government. He graduated from Old Dominion University majoring in information science in 1980 for a bachelor’s degree, followed by master and doctoral degree in information science in 1982 and 1990 at Alabama University. He was professor at Stillman College from 1989 to 1990 and at Alabama University from 1990 to 1991. Dr. Lee also worked in Hyundai (Halla) Heavy Industry from 1991 to 1993 as CIO.

A mathematics undergraduate in his native Australia, Rodney received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in 1981. From 1984 to 2010, he was on the MIT faculty, and completed his service as a Professor of Robotics. He was also the founding Director of the Institute’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and served in that role until 2007. In 1990, he co-founded iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), where he served variously as CTO, Chairman and board member until 2011. Rodney has been honored by election to the National Academy of Engineering, and has been elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Association of Computing Machinery, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Rodney is also an accomplished presenter, and speaks regularly to promote the value of robotics and artificial intelligence in venues throughout the world.

Steve Cousins is passionate about building and deploying robotic technology to help people. Before founding Savioke, he was the President and CEO of Willow Garage, where he oversaw the creation of the robot operating system (ROS), the PR2 robot, and the open source TurtleBot. In the last three years of his tenure there, Willow Garage spun off 8 companies including Suitable Technologies, Industrial Perception, Inc., Redwood Robotics, HiDOF (ROS and robotics consulting) and Unbounded Robotics. Steve is an active participant in the Robots for Humanity project. Steve has been a senior manager at IBM's Almaden Research Center, and a member of the senior staff at Xerox PARC. Steve holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University, BS and MS degrees in computer science from Washington University, and earned a micro-MBA while at IBM.

Patrick Egan is the editor of the Americas Desk at sUAS News and host and Executive Producer of the sUAS News Podcast Series and Drone TV. Patrick's experience in the field includes assignments with the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command Battle Lab investigating solutions on future warfare research projects. On the airspace integration side, he serves as director of special programs for the RCAPA (Remote Control Aerial Photography Association), on the ICC (International Coordination Council) which inputs to the EUROCAE wg-73, and the President of the Silicon Valley Chapter of AUVSI (Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International).

Brian is a strong believer in, frequent contributor to, and constant beneficiary of open source software. Since 2008, Brian has worked on the ROS Project, which develops and releases one of the most widely used robot software platforms in robotics research and education (and soon industry). He is founding and former lead developer on the open source Player Project, which continues to maintain widely used robot simulation and development tools. For his work on Player and ROS, Brian was recognized by MIT Technology Review with the TR35 award in 2011. Prior to joining OSRF, Brian was Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage. Previously, Brian was a Computer Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI, and before that, a postdoctoral research fellow in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University. Brian received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2003, his M.S. in Computer Science from USC in 2000, and his B.S.E. in Computer Engineering, with a secondary major in Mathematics and a minor in Robotics and Automation, from Tulane University in 1998.

Agenda Congratulatory Remarks Han Dong-man has been serving as Consul General of the Republic of Korea since May 2013. Consul General Han received his Bachelor’s at Yonsei University in Korea and his Master’s in International Organization Law at the Pantheon-Sorbonne University in Paris, France. He joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1985 and has held Secretary posts in Algeria, the United Kingdom, and Australia as well as in the Office of the President in Korea. In 2002, he served as the Director of the Security Policy Division at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade and as Consul at the Korean Consulate General in New York. He also served as the Minister-Counselor at the Korean Embassy in Washington, D.C. Prior to his post in San Francisco, he served as the Director-General of the International Economic Affairs Bureau of the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2011 – 2013). Consul General Han received the Order of the Service Medal in 2012 and he has written four books, including The Next 10 Years of Korea (ISBN 9788959753666), an insightful look at the future of Korea on the international stage for the next decade to come. He is married and has two sons.

Since 2001, Congressman Mike Honda has represented the 17th Congressional District of California in the U.S. House of Representatives. His district includes Silicon Valley, the birthplace of technology innovation and the leading region for the development of the technologies of tomorrow. First as a Peace Corps volunteer in El Salvador, then as an educator for over three decades, later as a San Jose Unified School Board member, Santa Clara Board of Supervisors, and California State Assemblyman – Mike’s commitment to public service is unparalleled and unwavering. Along with serving as a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Mike is Chair Emeritus of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, after having served as Chair for an unprecedented seven years. As an appropriator he continues to champion educational equity by securing funding to convene 27 of the nation’s foremost leaders in education to serve on the Equity and Excellence commission.

Dr. Frankie James is the managing director of GM’s Advanced Technology Office in Silicon Valley, where her team is focused on identifying new technologies and trends within the Silicon Valley business ecosystem that may be of benefit to GM. Her particular focus is on human-machine interactions (HMI) and driver experience. Prior to joining GM, Dr. James was the program manager for Human Computer Interaction (HCI) at SAP Research. Her research there included non-desktop interactions, accessibility, and cross-cultural interaction design. She has also worked for RIACS (the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science), a NASA contractor, where she developed voice interfaces for semi-autonomous robots. Dr. James received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in June 1998 for her research on audio HTML interfaces for blind users, and is a member of ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). Frankie's expertise is in human-computer interaction (HCI), with experience related to interfaces and interactions involving audio, voice or multimodal output and input, as well as accessibility.

Catherine Jhung is a vice president in the Technology and Energy Technology Groups at Hercules. Before joining Hercules, Jhung spent over 10 years in senior operational roles within startup companies, including sales, business development, research and product management. At Cleantech Group, Jhung ran the company’s data business, where she lead the product, engineering, research and sales teams. Prior to Cleantech Group, Jhung was the Director of Sales at edo Interactive, a firm developing digital marketing technologies leveraging pre-existing global, point of sale payments infrastructures along with modern social networking communities. Prior to edo Interactive, Jhung spent over five years on the executive team at Equilar, the leading research firm for benchmarking executive and board compensation. There, she built and managed the business development and client services divisions from the ground up, growing the business to over 600 clients. Jhung received an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, a bachelor’s in Agricultural Economics and a minor in Computer Information Systems from UC Davis.

Wendy Ju, PhD, is Executive Director for Interaction Design Research at Stanford’s Center for Design Research, and an Associate Professor in the Graduate Design Program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Her research is primarily focused on the design of interactive devices, particularly human-robot interaction and autonomous car interfaces. She received her Master's degree from the MIT Media Lab in 2001, and her doctorate from Stanford University in 2008. She is the author of the book The Design of Implicit Interactions, which is available from Morgan and Claypool.

Andra Keay is the Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics, an industry group supporting the innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies. Andra is also founder of Robot Launch, global robotics startup competition, and cofounder of Robot Garden, a new robotics hackerspace. Andra is Director of Industry & Startup Relations at Robohub.org, the global site for news and views on robotics and operates a well regarded AngelList syndicate for seed stage robotics startups.

Prof. Sangbae Kim is the director of the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory and an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. His research focuses on the bio-inspired robotic platform design by extracting principles from complex biological systems. Kim’s achievements on bio-inspired robot development include the world‘s first directional adhesive inspired from gecko lizards, and a climbing robot, Stickybot, that utilizes the directional adhesives to climb smooth surfaces featured in TIME’s best inventions in 2006. The MIT Cheetah achieves stable outdoor running at an efficiency of animals, employing biomechanical principles from studies of best runners in nature. This achievement was covered by more than 200 articles. He is a recipient of King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award (2008), DARPA YFA (2013), and NSF CAREER award (2014).

Yong-soo Kim is currently assistant Minister of ICT Policy Office of Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning. Prior to this position, he served as a Secretary of Communications of Cheongwadae(the Blue House). After passed the 31st Civil Service Examination, he has been working in ICT and telecommunication sector for a long time include senior officer of Communications Promotion and Strategy at Korea Communications Commission and Chief Executive Officer at the Office of President. Yong-soo Kim majored in Law at Seoul National University and has obtained his Master’s degree in International law at Georgetown University.

Vikas is responsible for all aspects (strategy, product management, engineering, GTM, etc.) of the launch and success of Mobility and IoT business as CA Technologies, a top 10 global enterprise software provider. Prior to CA Technologies, Vikas directed R&D at Ricoh, a $25B Japanese company with an innovation hub in Silicon Valley and later served as its Chief Software Architect leading a large software initiative that brought together many Ricoh and multi-brand products towards higher value services, while providing software strategy and technology guidance to Ricoh teams in the US, Japan, and India. Before Ricoh, Vikas worked at IBM’s prestigious R&D labs in senior technical and management roles in the areas of net mining, B2B information exchange, intelligent content processing, and smart contact center technologies. There, he received a corporate award for driving a technology to an ‘IBM Outstanding Accomplishment’ with significant impact on IBM’s services business along with several ‘IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement’ and ‘IBM Outstanding Innovation Achievement’ awards. Vikas is a frequent speaker at key events such as Mobility USA, Super Mobility Week, CA World, Gigaom, TechTarget, CTO Forum, MoneyToday K.E.Y. Platform of Korea, and SRII. He has co-edited two books on Service Science and System Systems by Springer, which were rated among the top 25% in their category. He in an inventor on over 30 patents and an author of over 25 publications. Vikas holds a Bachelor of Technology degree from the Indian Institute of Technology and two Masters degrees in Engineering from North America. In his spare time, Vikas follows the evolution of commercial aviation and is an avid tennis player.

Dr. Jaiyong Lee is a professor of electrical and computer engineering department. Dr. Lee has been in the academia since 1987, 7 years at POSTECH and 20 years at Yonsei University. As a director of the government sponsored Center of Advanced RFID/USN Technology from 2004 to 2012, he led the technology development in his field by obtaining various patents and contributing to scientific journals, as well as promoting collaboration between academia and industry through technology transfer. As a member of advisor to Korea IoT Association (KIOT) since 2005 and as the president of Korea Institute of Communication and Information Sciences (KICS) in 2012, he led government policies and boosted ICT industries, especially in IoT areas. Dr. Lee also led many international workshops such as World Forum-IoT 2014 as a co-chair. As a president of Giga Korea Foundation since 2013, he is leading the technology development for next generation ICT technology in Korea including 5G and IoT for future services. Dr. Lee also served as the dean of college of engineering and president of Industry- Academy Collaboration Foundation of Yonsei University. He holds the Ph.D. in computer engineering from Iowa State University, USA.

June has been working on designing and building middleware systems for over 20 years. He is currently leading KT’s Software Development Center to build platforms and other software systems for monitoring and controling building facilities, automobiles, and many other things based on analyzing big data from a large amount of various sensors. Before joing KT, June was in charge of building and maintaining SKTelecom and SKPlanet’s big data processing platforms from 2006 to 2013. He built a Hodoop based big data processing platform called SPADE and also built a real-time analytics platform called RAPID which were in use for years. Before coming back to Korea, he worked on Grid computing project called Globus which was a de facto standard in early 2000s. In that project, he was in charge of designing and implementing MDS (Monitoring and Discovering System) at ISI (Information Sciences Institute) in Marina del Rey, California.

David Merrill is the VP of Enabling Technology at 3D Robotics, where he finds and evaluates technology for the creation of future flying robots. 3D Robotics, based in Berkeley CA is the largest American maker of drones for consumer and professional use. The company recently released Solo, a first-of-its-kind drone that makes it easy for novices and experts to capture beautiful, cinematic aerial video. David was formerly president and co-founder of Sifteo, a San Francisco hardware+software startup spun out of his research at the MIT Media Lab. He has built multiple award-winning interfaces and technologies that reshape how people use computers. Dave and his work have been featured at TED, MoMA, the Discovery Channel, Popular Science and Wired. David holds a BS in Symbolic Systems and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and an MS and PhD from the MIT Media Lab.

Erin is the Director of Marketing at Suitable Technologies, the makers of the Beam+ and BeamPro telepresence devices. Beam combines user-controlled mobility with telepresence for teammates, guests, family, and friends who wish to interact from afar. She is a product storyteller with robotics experience in material handling, assistive devices, telepresence, and automation. Erin takes a vested interest in finding ways to catalyze the robotics market by identifying unique value propositions for new robotic products, and by creating community and cooperation between companies and thought leaders. Erin has her Masters in Mechanical Engineering from UMass Lowell and a BS in Industrial Engineering from Northeastern University.

Curtis Sasaki is the vice president of ecosystems and IoT general manager for Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center (SSIC). He leads new business creation and is responsible for driving growth and innovation through product, technology and ecosystem development. He works with entrepreneurs and startups in Silicon Valley and other global technology hotspots, focusing on Smart Health, Big Data and the Internet of Things. Prior to SSIC, Curtis was Senior Vice President of Samsung Media Solutions Center America (MSCA), where he oversaw the development of Samsung’s media services that work with Samsung Smart TVs, smartphones, tablets and other connected devices to deliver the best apps and content to the connected consumer. At MSCA, he also lead the Innovation Lab, a team that focuses on developing pioneering cloud services, the Developer Relations team that drove the Samsung Developer Conferences, as well as the North American Content Services team, which focuses on content partnerships and strategic partner relations. Curtis has appeared at a number of prestigious conferences as keynote/invited speaker including CES, JavaOne Conference, Blackberry Developers Conference, and Apple Developer Conferences. He is the recipient of more than 7 patents for innovative technologies.

Dr. Shin was the President of Korea Advanced Intelligent Robot Association between 2003 and 2006. And also he is the member of The National Academy of Engineering of Korea since 2010. He is appointed as the Chairman of KOSDAQ Listed Companies Association in 2015. Dr Shin is specifically interested in developing various service robots that contributes to utmost convenience and betterment of lifestyle. He is currently serving as the President of Yujin Robot Co., Ltd, which has been developing various service robots.

George Willman practices in the areas of technology transactions, intellectual property counseling, and patent prosecution. Representative transactions include licensing, development, service, distribution, manufacturing, electronic commerce, FinTech and corporate partnering agreements. He has counseled on intellectual property issues raised by merger and acquisition transactions and initial public offerings. George is a registered patent attorney and has assisted clients in obtaining patents in addition to counseling on infringement avoidance, strategic patenting, and developing U.S. and international patent portfolios. Prior to his legal career, George worked as a software and telecommunications engineer for ROLM, IBM, and Siemens in Silicon Valley and Munich, Germany. George serves as a mentor at the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.

Tim Wilson focuses on early-stage technology investments and currently represents Artiman on the Boards of Crossbar Semiconductor, Kaybus, Mossey Creek Technology, Prysm and Nutrinsic. From 2001 to 2011, Tim worked as a General Partner at Partech International.  Between 1997 and 2001, he served as the Chief Marketing Officer for Digital Island (NASDAQ: ISLD, acq by Cable & Wireless), a Partech portfolio company. Tim graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Bowdoin College. His Bachelor of Arts degree is in Physics. Following this, he completed his MBA from Duke University.

Jong-lok Yoon is currently the President of NIPA, National IT Industry Promotion Agency, an affiliated organization of Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning. Prior to this position, Jong-lok Yoon has been a Vice-Minister of Science, ICT and Future Planning.

He also worked in private sector like Bell Laboratories as a special researcher and took up multiple positions at Korea Telecom which is among top 3 Telecommunication Company in S. Korea. He has been one of the front-runners in the development of the IoT market in Korea and strives to foster growth of new technologies for the world.

Jong-lok Yoon has completed his CEO courses in Seoul National University and has obtained his Master’s degree in Electronics at Yonsei University.