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TOPIC :

Intelligent Robot Athletes
Keynote Speaker: Ph.D Masahide Nakamura
Prof. Hansjoerg(Jacky)Baltes
About the Speaker
Dr. Baltes was born and grew up in Munich, Germany. Prior to his studies, he was an accomplished athlete.

Dr. Baltes received his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Calgary, Canada in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning. For his Ph.D., Dr. Baltes developed a learning multi-strategy planning system called DoLittle.

From 1996 to 2002, Dr. Baltes worked as a Senior Lecturer in the department of computer science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. In 2002, Dr. Baltes moved to the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, where he was promoted to Full Professor in 2008.

In 2016, Prof. Baltes took up a position as Full Professor at the National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) in Taipei, Taiwan, where he was awarded an Outstanding Professor supplement and is now the Director of the Educational Robotics Lab. Dr. Baltes also continues to hold an adjunct appointment at the University of Manitoba.

Dr. Baltes and his students have participated at international robotics competitions for robotic soccer and urban search and rescue since 1998. His teams won honors in the FIRA HuroCup humanoid robot competition 2022 - HuroCup Adult Size Allround, 2022 2nd Place FIRA Taiwan Open Kid-size.

He was elected as President of the Federation International of Robot Sports Association (FIRA). FIRA is the oldest robot soccer competition (started in 1996 by Prof. Jong-Hwan Kim from KAIST, Korea). He is the founding chair of the FIRA HuroCup competition. HuroCup is the most challenging competition for intelligent humanoid robots as a single robot must compete in 11 events (sprint, marathon, obstacle run, spartan race - uneven terrain and wall climbing, united soccer, long jump, basketball, weight lifting, mini-DRC, and archery).

He was an Executive Committee member of the International RoboCup Federation from 2010 to 2022, and a member of the humanoid league organizing committee and the technical committee since 2002.

He is also the founder and Chair of the IEEE Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) competition “Humanoid Application Challenge - Robot Magic.” IROS is the flagship conference for robotics.

Dr. Baltes has published extensively and was on the program committee for several international conferences.

Dr. Baltes has been founding member of two successful startups Cogmation Inc., Winnipeg, Canada and Taibotics, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Dr. Baltes also holds 1 U.S.A. patent, 2 Chinese patents, and 1 European patent.
Positions
  • International Committees President of Federation of International Robot SportsAssociation (FIRA) 2021 – 2024
  • RoboCup Federation, Member of Internal Advisory Board (2015 – now)
  • Executive Committee RoboCup Federation (2009 - 2015, 2016-now)
  • Organizing Committee and Technical Committee RoboCup Humanoid League (2002 – now)
  • and more…
  • TOPIC :

    Merging Sensors, AI, and VR for Athlete Training
    Keynote Speaker: Ph.D Dr. Min-Chun Hu
    Prof. Min-Chun Hu
    About the Speaker
    Bio: Dr. Min-Chun Hu received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Taiwan University in 2011. After graduation, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Research Center for Information Technology Innovation in Academia Sinica, and later served as an assistant/associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Cheng Kung University. She is currently a professor in the Department of Computer Science at National Tsing Hua University.

    Dr. Hu has been recognized with numerous awards, including Exploration Research Award of Pan Wen Yuan Foundation (2015), Outstanding Young Researcher Award from the Computer Society of the Republic of China (2017), IEEE Tainan Section Best Young Professional Member Award (2018), Google Research exploreCSR Award (2021-2024), CES Innovation Awards (2023), and NSTC Ta-You Wu Memorial Award (2023).

    Her research interests encompass digital signal processing, multimedia content analysis, computer vision, computer graphics, virtual reality, and augmented reality. As a passionate basketball enthusiast, she has long been dedicated to developing sports technology that assists athletes in training and intelligence performance analysis.

    Dr. Hu previously served as Deputy Executive Director of the Taiwan Institute of Sports Science and is also the co-founder of NeuinX, a startup specializing in AI technology for sports analysis.

    International Symposium on Computer, Consumer and Control, 2025
    National Chin-Yi University of Technology