Prof. Wenqi Hu holds a Bachelor's degree in Microelectronics and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, focusing on optically-controlled microrobots. After completing his Ph.D., Prof. Hu joined the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (MPI-IS) as a Humboldt research fellow and progressed to a senior scientist role in 2019, later becoming the head of the bioinspired autonomous miniature robots group in 2022. His research has contributed to the fields of soft magnetic materials and the control of miniature soft robots, with his work published in respected journals such as Nature and Science Robotics. Dr. Hu's research has garnered over 5,000 citations and received accolades like the ICRA 2012 Best Conference Paper Award Finalist, RSS 2019 Best Paper Award, and the Günter Petzow Prize from the Max Planck Society. Beyond his research, he also serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Micro-Bio Robotics and participates in various committees for conferences such as Living Machine and MARSS.

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Prof. Mo Li is a Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and Division of Integrative Systems and Design, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Before joining HKUST in 2023, he was a Professor at Nanyang Technological University. Prof. Li has been internationally recognized for his research in wireless and mobile computing. Over the past few years, Prof. Li has developed numerous methods, techniques, and systems that resulted in top journal and conference publications that received over 10,000 citations. He has been on the editorial board of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, ACM Transactions on Internet of Things, and IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, all leading journals in the field. He also served the technical program committee member for top conferences in computer systems and networking, including ACM MobiCom, MobiSys, SenSys, and others. Prof. Li is a Distinguished Member of the ACM since 2019, and a Fellow of the IEEE since 2020.

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Dr. Hongri (Richard) Gu is currently an Assistant Professor in the Division of Integrative Systems and Design (ISD) at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). He received his Bachelor’s degree in Mechatronics Engineering from Zhejiang University in 2014, during which he also participated in the Young Scientist Exchange Program (YSEP) at Tokyo Institute of Technology from 2012 to 2014. In 2016, he completed his Master’s degree in Micro and Nanosystems at ETH Zurich. From 2017 to 2021, Dr. Gu conducted his doctoral research at the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab, ETH Zurich, under the supervision of Prof. Bradley Nelson. During his Ph.D., he served as an editorial assistant for Science Robotics and the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, managing submissions in microrobotics, medical robotics, and soft robotics. From 2022 to 2024, he pursued postdoctoral research in the Department of Physics at the University of Konstanz in Germany.

Dr. Gu’s research focuses on developing structured magnetic materials and robotic systems for future disruptive medical technologies, with an emphasis on understanding multi-scale physiological transport and inventing novel medical devices and surgical tools.

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Ziqi Wang is an Assistant Professor at the Division of Integrative Systems and Design (ISD) at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). Before joining HKUST, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Creative Computation Lab and Sycamore at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2024, under the supervision of Prof. Stefana Parascho and Prof. Maryam Kamgarpour. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Computational Robotics Lab at ETH Zurich, advised by Prof. Stelian Coros. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2021 from the Geometric Computing Laboratory at EPFL, where he was advised by Prof. Mark Pauly. He completed his bachelor's degree in Mathematics in 2017 at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

Ziqi is interested in interdisciplinary projects that connect architecture, robotics, and computer graphics. His current research focuses on the computational design, analysis, and fabrication of complex assemblies, with applications ranging from toys and furniture to buildings. The goal is to create a seamless end-to-end workflow that enables users to design and fabricate personalized items using artificial intelligence and robotics. He has years of experience collaborating with researchers from various disciplines, including robotics, architecture, and civil and mechanical engineering. He has applied his research to constructing several large-scale architectural demonstrators. He has published several works in the top computer graphics journal, ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG), and received a Best Paper Honorable Mention Award at SIGGRAPH 2022.

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