Dr Claudia Eckert is Professor of Design in the School of Engineering and Innovation at the Open University, the British distance education university. Her research interests lie in understanding and supporting design processes of complex engineering products. Her research combines design theory and philosophy with empirical studies. She has published over 300 papers in international journal and conference proceedings and serves as an area editor for Research in Engineering Design and Design Science. She is an active member of design society, where she served as a member of the board of management and chair of the advisory board, and lead a special interest group on design processes.

Professor Maria Pia Fanti received the Laurea degree in electronic engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy. She was a visiting researcher at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, New York, in 1999. Since 1983, she has been with the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering of the Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy, where she is currently a Full Professor of system and control engineering and Chair of the Laboratory of Automation and Control.

Her research interests include management and modeling of complex systems, such as transportation, logistics and manufacturing systems; discrete event systems; Petri nets; consensus protocols; fault detection. Prof. Fanti is IEEE fellow and has published more than 350 papers and two textbooks on her research topics.

She is senior editor of the IEEE Trans. on Automation Science and Engineering and Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems. She was member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, and member of the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automaton Society, and chair of the Technical Committee on Automation in Logistics of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. Prof. Fanti was involved in many international conferences and in particular she was General Chair of the 2011 IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Service Operations and logistics, and Informatics and the 2019 IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Conference.

Prof. Damien Chablat has obtained his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Nantes/Ecole Centrale de Nantes, France, in 1998. After finishing his PhD, dr. Chablat has worked for one year at the famous Centre for Intelligent Machines within the McGill University, Canada with Prof. Jorge Angeles. He came back to France and started to work at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in 1999. He became CNRS senior researcher in 2011 and works now in the ROMAS team (Robots and Machines for Manufacturing, Society and Services) at Laboratoire des Sciences du Numérique de Nantes as the Team Manager. Two important milestones in Damien Chablat’s career had leu in 2023: the first in February 2023 when he assumed the role of head of robotics action at the National Research Agency (ANR) and the second when he becomes scientific manager of the European project Ethena with the University of Cluj Napoca in Romania.

His research interests include robotics, design of parallel manipulators and human fatigue evaluation for industrial tasks. Under his supervision, 22 PhD degrees have been awarded, while and he is currently leading other 5 PhD students within four different research projects. As an evidence of his exceptional research career, Damien Chablat is in the Stanford University Names World’s Top 2%.

Prof. Chablat has managed and has been involved in numerous research projects, among which: European projects: EnHance, Next Generation of Production Systems, Angels; French National Research Agency Projects: SiRoPa, Raamo, AviNeck, LobbyBot, Ecarp, StartMesh; IRT projects: PIVIPP, FAST, ASPEN, Cobot++, Mascot, Cobolege, and French Companies: Airbus, Tecnomatix, Aldebaran, Thales, Safran, ArmorMeca, Orthopus, Weez-U Welding and CETIM. His areas of excellence are the modelling and innovative design of parallel robots, workspace and singularity analysis, optimal design, stiffness analysis, kinematics, virtual reality, muscle activity, development of manipulative and locomotive robots, dynamic control, and perception.

Prof. Chablat is highly visible on the national level and actively contributes to the international scientific community via his presence in the editorial boards of A-rank journals (IFToMM Mechanism and Machine Theory, ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics).

Damien Chablat has published over 300 papers, with more than 70 in high-ranking journals (Machine and Mechanism Theory, Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics, Journal of Mechanical Design, etc.), out of which 34 papers in Q1, and 15 in Q2. He also has over 8200 citations, and an H-index of 44 (Google Scholar) and 30 (Scopus).

Wenbin(William) Dai, Professor and Assistant Dean at the School of Electrical Information and Electronic Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He received the National Outstanding Youth Fund of NSFC in 2020 and is the Chief-Secretary of the Shanghai Association of Automation. He has been mainly engaged in the research of next-generation distributed industrial control software, industrial informatics, and industrial edge computing. He has cooperated with Industry to complete the world’s first cloud-based PLC experiment and developed the first web-based IEC 61499 IDE and Runtime for low-code and no-code development. As the first author, he published more than 70 papers in IEEE Transactions and conferences, published 2 monographs, and co-published 1 monograph. He is the PI of 3 projects of the NSFC and the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Key R&D Program, and won the title of Top Young Talent in Shanghai and Tang Zhongying Young Scholar. At the same time, he is an expert of the IEC TC65B Distributed Industrial Control Software Standards Committee, serves as the chair of the IEEE edge computing standard working group and as the chair for IEEE P2805 series standards for edge computing. He currently serves as the associate editor of IEEE T-II, Fundamental Research, IEEE-IES TC-II chair(2020-2023), and technical program chair of several IEEE-IES flagship conferences such as IEEE ICIT 2022, IEEE ISIE 2023, IEEE INDIN 2025.