Pano leads XRC Labs as its Founder and Managing Director. Having founded four startups around key platform shifts, he saw the seismic shift coming to retail and with the right vision and timing recruited Parsons School of Design and Kurt Salmon a part of Accenture Strategy to be founding sponsors. Now with 55 accelerated startups, 10 active world-class retail sponsors, 250+ business mentors, Pano has built a world-class ecosystem for retail and consumer goods innovation at XRC Labs. He speaks regularly at NRF national and regional meetings, Shoptalk, and RILA executive conferences. He leverages a deep startup network in Silicon Valley, New York, and Boston to fuse leading technology, E-commerce and user experience innovations to existing customer-oriented businesses.

Brad Bogolea is CEO and Co-Founder of Simbe Robotics, where he is responsible for the company’s vision and execution of its leading automation solution for the retail industry. The NRF Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the National Retail Federation (NRF), has named Brad to “The List of People Shaping Retail’s Future.” Prior to Simbe, Brad spent 10 years in the energy and wireless sensor industry.

Jeff Burnstein is the President of the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), the parent group of the Robotic Industries Association (RIA), AIA – Advancing Vision + Imaging, the Motion Control and Motors Association (MCMA) and A3 Mexico. Together these trade groups represent over 1,000 global companies involved in robotics, vision, motion control and motors and related automation technologies..

Martial Hebert is a Dean of the School of Computer Science, Professor of Robotics at Carnegie-Mellon University and Director of the Robotics Institute. His research interests include computer vision and robotics, especially recognition in images and video data, model building and object recognition from 3D data, and perception for mobile robots and for intelligent vehicles. His group has developed approaches for object recognition and scene analysis in images, 3D point clouds, and video sequences.

In the area of machine perception for robotics, his group has developed techniques for people detection, tracking, and prediction, and for understanding the environment of ground vehicles from sensor data. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Computer Vision.

Kevin Lynch is chair of the mechanical engineering department at Northwestern University and director of the Center for Robotics and Biosystems. His research is in robotic manipulation, locomotion, human-robot systems, and robot swarms. He is editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, co-author of leading textbooks on robotics and mechatronics, instructor of six Coursera online courses forming the “Modern Robotics” specialization, and an IEEE fellow. He received his BSE in electrical engineering from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Andra Keay is Managing Director and Founder of Silicon Valley Robotics, the leading non-profit robotics cluster. The process of commercializing innovation is at the heart of Silicon Valley Robotics, and lessons learned are applied globally. Andra is an expert in aligning the multidisciplinary stakeholders required in a high-tech innovation cluster and speaks regularly on the growing business of AI, robotics, and the ethical issues that emerge.

Silicon Valley Robotics is the leading non-profit robotics cluster. The process of commercializing innovation is at the heart of Silicon Valley Robotics. We take the best ecosystem practices from Silicon Valley’s history of innovation (transistors, computers, mobile, internet) and apply it to the emerging industries of robotics and AI. SVR partners with many global organizations to develop ecosystems, to teach innovation practices, to provide a landing pad for visiting companies, and to make connections with robotics and AI startups and investors.

Dr. John Ostrem has over 25 years’ experience developing new technology, bringing products to market and founding new companies. He is the CEO and co-founder of AvatarMind, a company that makes the iPal social robot for children’s education, elder care, and retail/hospitality. He founded China MobileSoft in 2001, a company that developed Linux-based telecommunications software for the Chinese and International markets, and has served as its Chairman, CEO, and CTO.

Subsequently, he was CTO and Chief Scientist of Nexage, a company that provides mobile Ad optimization and brokering services. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Panel for Robotics for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Dr. Ostrem began his career as a scientist at SRI International (the former Stanford Research Institute). He has a Ph.D. from the University of California.

Todd Murphey is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and of Physical Therapy and Human Movement Sciences in the Feinberg School of Medicine, both at Northwestern University.

He received his Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology. His laboratory is part of the Neuroscience and Robotics Laboratory, and his research interests include robotics, control, computational methods, assistive/rehabilitative robotics, and computational neuroscience. He received the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2006, was a member of the 2014-2015 DARPA/IDA Defense Science Study Group, and is a member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board.

Mr. Santiago has more than 21 years of enterprise sales, operations management, business transformation and strategic planning experience in serving the retail, manufacturing, distribution, finance and hospitality industries. Currently, Mr. Santiago is the Vice President of Global Sales of Badger Technologies, a product division of Jabil. In this role, he is responsible for driving all aspects of the sales, development, delivery and service for Badger Technologies’ suite of retail offerings.

Prior to Badger Technologies, Mr. Santiago has served in both VP and C-level positions as an influential business executive and leader with impeccable record of driving profit and operational efficiencies in such companies as Quadient (a Neopost Company), MobiManage, Intellinetics and Lexmark International. Mr. Santiago is a graduate of Eastern Kentucky University and a former United States Army Officer and Veteran of Operation Desert Storm. Mr. Santiago holds various industry certifications in Lean Six Sigma, Total Quality Management (TQM), Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) and ITIL.

Marios is the Founder and Director of the Biometrics Center at Carnegie Mellon University and is a Research Professor at the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department and CMU CyLab.

His research is mainly focused on developing algorithms for robust face and iris biometrics, as well as pattern recognition, machine vision and computer image understanding for enhancing biometric systems performance. He received his B. Eng. in Microelectronics Systems Engineering from University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology in the U.K., his Master of Science in Robotics from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and his Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, also at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Robert Zhang, is Co-Founder and President of CloudMinds Technology, where he is responsible for the company’s global business and product strategies, operations, and strategic partnerships. Prior to co-founding CloudMinds, Robert worked as Head of Service Strategy and Operations for Samsung Telecommunications America.

Robert earned a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computational Mechanics and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Illinois, an M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. from Tongji University, China.