SCAI Mission & People

Raja Chatila, IEEE Fellow, is Professor emeritus at Sorbonne Université. He is former Director of the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR) and of the Laboratory of Excellence “SMART” on human-machine interaction. He was director of LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse France, in 2007-2010. His research covers several aspects of Robotics in robot navigation and SLAM, motion planning and control, cognitive and control architectures, human-robot interaction, machine learning, and ethics. He works on robotics projects in the areas of service, field, aerial and space robotics. He is author of over 160 international publications on these topics. He was President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society for the term 2014-2015. He is co-chair of the Responsible AI Working group in the Global Patnership on AI (GPAI). He was member of the High Level Expert Group in AI with the European Commission (HLEG-AI), of the CERNA the Ethics Committee on Research in Information Science and Technology of the Allistene Alliance which published a report on the Ethics of Research in Robotics in November 2014 (in French). He is chair of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems.

Recognized worldwide as one of the leading experts in artificial intelligence, Yoshua Bengio is most known for his pioneering work in deep learning, earning him the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, “the Nobel Prize of Computing,” with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. He is a Full Professor at Université de Montréal, and the Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute. He co-directs the CIFAR Learning in Machines & Brains program as Senior Fellow and acts as Scientific Director of IVADO. In 2018, he collected the largest number of new citations in the world for a computer scientist and in 2019 was awarded the prestigious Killam Prize. He is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of London and Canada and Officer of the Order of Canada. Concerned about the social impact of AI and the objective that AI. Photo Credits: Maryse Boyce

Professor Aude Billard is head of the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory (LASA) at the School of Engineering at the EPFL. She received a M.Sc. in Physics from EPFL (1995), a MSc. in Knowledge-based Systems (1996) and a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence (1998) from the University of Edinburgh. She was the recipient of the Intel Corporation Teaching award, the Swiss National Science Foundation career award in 2002, the Outstanding Young Person in Science and Innovation from the Swiss Chamber of Commerce and the IEEE-RAS Best Reviewer Award. Her research on human-robot interaction and robot learning from human demonstration was featured in numerous premier venues (BBC, IEEE Spectrum, Wired) and received numerous best paper awards at major robotics conferences, among which ICRA, IROS and ROMAN, as well as the 2015 King-Sun Fu Memorial Award for the best 2014 IEEE Transaction in Robotics paper.

Holger H. Hoos is Professor of Machine Learning at Universiteit Leiden (the Netherlands) and Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia (Canada). He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Fellow and Vice-president of the European AI Association (EurAI), past president of the Canadian Association for Artificial Intelligence and one of the initiators as well as Chair of the Board of CLAIRE, an organisation that seeks to strengthen European excellence in AI research and innovation (claire-ai.org). He also leads the ICT-48 VISION coordination mandate for the newly created European networks of centres of excellence in AI. Holger is well known for his work across a broad range of topics in artificial intelligence, notably on the automated design of high-performance algorithms; he is one of the originators of the concept of automated machine learning (AutoML).

Jim Kurose is a Distinguished University Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences and Associate Chancellor for Partnerships and Innovation at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he has been since receiving his PhD in computer science from Columbia University. He has held a number of visiting scientist positions in the US and abroad, including the Sorbonne University, INRIA, Technicolor, and IBM Research. From 2015 to 2019, Jim was on leave, serving as Assistant Director at the US National Science Foundation, where he led the Directorate of Computer and Information Science and Engineering, and in 2018 also served as the Assistant Director for Artificial Intelligence in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. His research interests include computer networks and multimedia systems; architecture and protocols and he is a Co-PI of the NSF AI Institute for Future Edge Networks and Distributed Intelligence. He has received a number of awards for his research, teaching and service, including the IEEE Infocom Award, the ACM SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award, the IEEE Computer Society Taylor Booth Education Medal, and the CRA Distinguished Service award. With Keith Ross, he is the co-author of the best-selling textbook, Computer Networking: a Top Down Approach (Pearson), now in its 8th edition. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE.

Caroline Lair is the founder of The Good AI, the first community of AI startups and talent on a mission to help deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals. The Good AI supports more than 180 projects from 30 countries to date. 

She’s also the co-founder of Women in AI, an international nonprofit working toward a gender-inclusive AI. 

Prior to this, Caroline did operate in various business positions, lately at Snips, building private-by-design AI Voice Assistant ( acquired by Sonos in November 2019) and at HCVC venture capital firm, as an investor and partner. 

Caroline holds two master's degrees in business (EM Lyon, France) and international relations (Lyon III, France).

Francesca Rossi is an IBM fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader. Based at the T.J. Watson IBM Research Lab (New York, USA), she has been a professor of computer science at the University of Padova for 20 years before joining IBM. Her research interests focus on artificial intelligence, specifically they include constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, and collective decision making. She is also interested in ethical issues in the development and behavior of AI systems, in particular for decision support systems for group decision making. On these topics, she has published over 200 scientific articles in journals and conference proceedings, and as book chapters. She is a fellow of both the worldwide association of AI (AAAI), she will preside in 2022-2024, and of the European one (EurAI). She has been president of IJCAI (International Joint Conference on AI), an executive councillor of AAAI, and the Editor in Chief of the Journal of AI Research. She is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Future of Life Institute (Cambridge, USA) and a deputy director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (Cambridge, UK). She is in the executive committee of the IEEE global initiative on ethical considerations on the development of autonomous and intelligent systems and she is a member of the board of directors of the Partnership on AI, where she represents IBM as one of the founding partners. She has been a member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on AI and the

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering, and Director of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. He is a recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award and held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris. In 2021 he received the OBE from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth and gave the Reith Lectures. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, an Andrew Carnegie Fellow, and a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His book "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (with Peter Norvig) is the standard text in AI, used in 1500 universities in 135 countries. His research covers a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence, with a current emphasis on the long-term future of artificial intelligence and its relation to humanity. He has developed a new global seismic monitoring system for the nuclear-test-ban treaty and is currently working to ban lethal autonomous weapons.

Dr. Cécile Wendling is Group Head of Security Strategy and Awareness at AXA. With more than 15-year-experience in long term strategic thinking and foresight, her role is to anticipate trends and disruptions that will impact the way we can secure AXA, its business and customers and make sure AXA employees are well trained to keep AXA safe, secure and resilient. Prior to this position, she was Group Head of Foresight at AXA and associated researcher at Centre de Sociologie des Organisations (CNRS-Sciences po Paris) in sociology of risks and catastrophes. She has a PhD from the European University Institute on EU crisis management. She gives lectures on Foresight methods, risk and crisis management, among others. She is Member of The ENISA Advisory Board, The ANSSI AGORA 41, think tank of the French Agency in charge of Cybersecurity, The board of Futuribles, a French Foresight Think Tank, The board of the French Foresight Society. She has written reports for the OECD and the European Commission Rapporteur of the EU foresight modeling expert group, and published in Academic journals.

Matthieu Cord is a Full Professor at the Computer Science Laboratory (LIP6) of Sorbonne University. He also works part-time at the Valeo.ai research laboratory. He is the winner of a research and teaching Chair in Artificial Intelligence by the French government’s national AI 2020 initiative75. His research focuses on computer vision, machine learning and AI. He is the author of more than 150 international scientific publications on visual information retrieval, pattern recognition, multimodal vision and language understanding.

Olivier Cussenot is a Full Professor in the Faculty of Medicine at Sorbonne University and a surgeon qualified in urology, oncology and medical genetics. He is also Head of the cooperative group in urological oncology for the National Cancer Institute and National Prostate Cancer Genomics Programme. Olivier Cussenot is the author of 407 referenced scientific publications with research focused in the use of AI for personalized medicine, predictive oncology and precision medicine.

Marie-Christine Ho Ba Tho is Full Professor in Mechanics and Head of Research at Université de Technologie de Compiègne. Her research concerns biomechanics of the musculoskeletal system and she is specialized in the development of patient specific models (geometry, mechanical properties, loads) derived from medical imaging. Recently her work is focused in the modelling of uncertainties of biomechanics data and their propagation in the development of medical computer aided system diagnosis.

Caroline Marti is Full Professor in Information and Communication Sciences at CELSA (École des hautes études en sciences de l’information et de la communication) and coordinates the Branding Department. She is interested in issues of AI through the study of discourse and discrimination in the media, and in particular, social media.

Jian-Sheng Sun is Head of Department of Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle and Co-founder, Chairman and CEO at DNA Therapeutics SA. He has managed this virtually integrated biopharmaceutical company (from scratch to clinical stage) and executed original translational 1st-in-class drug development (from paradigm-shift concept to clinic), with the help of a virtual management team aggregating skills from the experts in early stage drug development, chemistry-manufacture-control (CMC), regulatory affairs, and Key Opinion Leaders in oncology.