Theme: Bridging the Gap from Research Lab to Startup Company
Prof. Kazuya Takeda
VP in charge of startup, Nagoya University, co-founder and former representative director, TierIV Inc.
Dr.Jaesik Lee
Co-Founder and President of Technology, Navitas Solutions
Dr. Midia Yousefi
Senior Research Scientist, Cloud and AI organization, Microsoft, USA
Dr. Zhaojin Lu
Director of the Tellhow AI Research Institute and the Chief Scientist at Tellhow Creative Technology Group
Moderator
Prof François Ladouceur
B.Ing, MSc, PhD, The University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia
Prof. Kazuya Takeda
VP in charge of startup, Nagoya University, co-founder and former representative director, TierIV Inc.
Biography
Dr. Kazuya Takeda serves as a Vice President of Nagoya University in charge of Digital Strategy and Startup Promotion, as well as a Professor at the Institute of Innovation for Future Society (InFus) and Graduate School of Informatics, Nagoya University. He is also a Director at Tier IV, Inc.
His research primarily focuses on signal processing and machine learning of behavior signals and their applications. His achievements include the 2020 IEEE ITS Society Outstanding Research Award and six best paper awards from IEEE international conferences and workshops.
Dr. Takeda co-founded Tier IV, a university startup aimed at democratizing autonomous driving technologies by developing the open-source software platform, Autoware. TierIV grows into a company with a market capitalization of 100B JPY. He has been the former representative director of the company (2016-2023). He is also a co-founder of two other university startups, Emit-Japan (e-learning) and Human Dataware Lab (Signal AI).
Dr.Jaesik Lee
Co-Founder and President of Technology, Navitas Solutions
Biography
Dr. Jaesik Lee received the Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2001.
From 1991 to 1996, he worked at LG Semiconductor on high-speed dynamic memories. In 2001, he joined Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ, and worked on high-speed mixed-signal IC design for high-performance broadband communication subsystems. He founded the Aletav Technologies aimed at developing a broadband RF signal processing subsystem in 2009. In 2010, Dr. Lee co-founded the Navitas Solutions, Hillsborough, NJ, focusing on wireless battery management system.
His research primarily focuses on high-speed mixed-signal IC design, wireless sensor network architecture and protocol, and fault-tolerant sensor design.
Dr. Midia Yousefi
Senior Research Scientist, Cloud and AI organization, Microsoft, USA
Biography
Dr. Midia Yousefi is a distinguished Senior Research Scientist within the Cloud and AI division at Microsoft, where she is actively engaged in a spectrum of research initiatives pertaining to audio and speech technologies. She attained her Doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her career commenced with a postdoctoral tenure at the University of Texas at Dallas, under the supervision of Dr. John Hansen. During this period, she made significant contributions to numerous projects, notably in the restoration and digitization of the Apollo corpus, alongside the formulation of benchmarks for the detection, separation, and recognition of overlapped speech. Dr. Yousefi’s scholarly pursuits predominantly revolve around the domains of End-to-End Speech-to-Speech Translation, Text-to-Speech Synthesis, Automatic Speech Recognition, and Speaker Diarization.
Dr. Zhaojin Lu
Director of the Tellhow AI Research Institute and the Chief Scientist at Tellhow Creative Technology Group
Biography
Dr. Zhaojin Lu is the Director of the Tellhow AI Research Institute and the Chief Scientist at Tellhow Creative Technology Group. He received his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea, in 2012, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in 2015. Dr. Lu also serves as a visiting researcher at several prestigious institutions.
His research focuses on areas such as intelligent robotics, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and big data mining. He has published extensively in top-tier journals and conferences like CVPR and ICCV, and has been involved in significant research projects, accumulating awards and research funding exceeding 300 million RMB.
Beyond academia, Dr. Lu has a strong track record in product development and commercialization, having launched multiple successful internet products. His contributions to technology and AI continue to impact both the scientific and commercial sectors significantly.
Prof François Ladouceur
B.Ing, MSc, PhD, The University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia
Biography
Prof Ladouceur is currently director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW focussing on semiconductor fabrication supporting a large user-base of academic and industrial researchers. He is also professor in Electrical Engineering where he teaches both technical courses (photonics) and entrepreneurial engineering since 2005.
Prof Ladouceur has a long history of involvement in applied research and translation activities. He has co-founded three startups, including Silanna Pty Ltd, which has grown into an important UV and semiconductor manufacturer. He is now fully involved in the translation of optical brain/computer interfaces developed at UNSW over the past decade.
Prof Ladouceur holds BEng and MSc degrees from École Polytechnique de Montréal and graduated with a PhD in optical telecommunication from the Australian National University (ANU)