Prof. Jun Wang
City University of Hong Kong
Title: AI-Powered Planning and Control of Chiller Systems
Bio: Jun Wang is a chair professor at City University of Hong Kong. Prior to this position, he held various academic positions at Dalian University of Technology, Case Western Reserve University, University of North Dakota, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He also held various short-term visiting positions at USAF Armstrong Laboratory, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Dalian University of Technology, and Swinburne University of Technology. He received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering and an M.S. degree from Dalian University of Technology and his Ph.D. degree from Case Western Reserve University. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence and was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics from 2014 to 2019 and is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence. He is an IEEE Life Fellow, a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition and the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering, and a foreign member of Academia Europaea. He is a recipient of the APNNA Outstanding Achievement Award, IEEE CIS Neural Networks Pioneer Award, CAAI Wu Wenjun AI Achievement Award, and IEEE SMCS Norbert Wiener Award, among other distinctions.
Abstract: Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems consume about 40% of the energy in commercial and residential buildings. As a crucial part of heat removal from a thermal space to the outside, a chiller system accounts for more than half of the energy consumption in an HVAC system. In this talk, I will first describe the problem formulations for chiller loading with cardinality constraints as well as physical constraints. I will then present several collaborative neurodynamic systems to solve the formulated constrained optimization problems for chiller loading in centralized and distributed settings. In addition, I will propose neurodynamics-driven approaches to receding-horizon distributed chiller loading and the hybrid model predictive control of distributed chiller systems.
Prof. Xiao Wang
Anhui University
Title: Empowering Smart Mobility with Computational Social Intelligence
Bio: Dr. Xiao Wang is a Professor at the Institute of Embodied Intelligence, Anhui University. She directs the Engineering Research Center of Intelligent Technology and Autonomous Systems at Anhui Province. Additionally, Professor Wang holds the position of Vice President of the IEEE ITS Society.
Abstract: Current autonomous driving systems, while technologically advanced, often fall short in understanding and responding to the implicit social cues that govern real-world traffic interactions. This gap results in a fundamental dilemma: vehicles that are technically proficient yet socially incompetent. To address this, we propose Computational Social Intelligence (CSI) as a transformative paradigm that integrates artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, and urban mobility to enable socially-aware and human-centric autonomous systems. Our approach is built on four pillars: (1) multi-agent interaction modeling using an embodied cognition-driven framework, achieving state-of-the-art trajectory prediction with 42% reduction in ADE and 40% in FDE; (2) human-like social behavior recognition through temporal interaction signal detection and multi-feature intention inference; (3) safety-first decision-making informed by cognitive science; and (4) an ethical framework ensuring fairness, privacy, and transparency. We demonstrate that CSI not only enhances prediction accuracy and safety but also fosters trust and social compliance, paving the way for a future where smart mobility is not only intelligent but also intuitively human.
Prof. Petros Ioannou
University of Southern California
Title: Management, Control and Optimization for Vehicles and Traffic for Safety, Mobility and Efficiency
Bio: Petros Ioannou is a University Professor at the University of Southern California and holds the A.V ‘Bal’ Balakrishnan Endowed Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He also holds a courtesy appointment with the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Industrial Systems Engineering. He is the founder and Director of the Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies and co-founder of the University Transportation Center METRANS and Associate Director for research for the Pacific Southwest Region (PSR) University Transportation Center (UTC) at the University of Southern California. He is also the founder and Director of a successful Master program in Financial Engineering housed at the Viterbi School of Engineering and the Director of a newly established center on Responsible AI for Decision Making in Finance (CREDIF). Dr. Ioannou is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Inventors and Foreign Member of the Academia Europaea and the European Academy of Sciences, a Life Fellow of IEEE and Fellow of IFAC and AAAS. He is the author/co-author of 11 books and over 400 research papers in the areas of controls and applications and intelligent transportation systems.
Abstract: Technology advances in recent decades open the way to revolutionize the way we transport people and goods in environments that are becoming increasingly connected. This connectivity facilitates the automation of decisions and control and the move from physical environments to virtual ones where human intelligence is enhanced by powerful AI, control and optimization techniques. In this talk I will discuss three different levels of control and automation. The first has to do with vehicle control on the physical layer where safety is a priority, the second is on higher level of controlling traffic flow to manage congestion where mobility is the main priority and the third is to manage and optimize systems operating within systems using co-simulations and centralized coordination and decision making. I will provide examples in each area and applications from freight routing to shuttle scheduling and routing.
Prof. Paul Werbos
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Title: Necessity and technical requirements for a global cybersocial contract
Bio: Paul Werbos is best known (and most cited) for the original discovery of backpropagation, and for the theorem establishing its validity, as part of his PhD thesis in Applied Mathematics for Harvard in 1974. Even before 1974, he had developed backpropagation as one element of a more general approach to reinforcement learning (http://vixra.org/abs/1902.0046), which combined a new way to learn to approximate dynamic programming with key insights from Freud’s theory of how learning works in neurons of the brain. He inaugurated the field which we now know of as RLADP, Reinforcement Learning and Approximate Dynamic Programming, building on this earlier work, his later papers, and on the research area of Adaptive and Intelligent Systems at NSF which he led from 1988 to 2015.
Backpropagation and RLADP are the main foundations of the new deep learning revolution, which can be traced back to a research program he started at NSF, Cognitive Optimization and Prediction (COPN), and to an award he pushed there to Andrew Ng and Yann LeCun, whose success stories they conveyed to Sergey Brin at Google. AIS also led to more powerful and advanced developments and applications of RLADP, where massive new breakthroughs are still appearing, in areas from electric power, to the control of air and ground vehicles, and in new options for quantum technology for observing the sky, quantum RLADP and cybersecurity.
He has been active for decades in IEEEUSA, in the planning committee of the Millennium Project (www.millennium-project.org), and in the National Space Society. In 2009, as a legislative fellow handling climate and many other areas of science for Senator Specter, learned the realities of many S&T challenges facing the world today.
Summary of the Talk: In its second major debate on AI (UN 2025),the UN Security Council session recognized that the most powerful new AI — Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) — is already a massive change in the means of production and the means of destruction, which will radically change the world. Unlike the first such security council session (July 2023), it demonstrated extreme chaos, with different visions and plans threatening gross confusion and conflict. An initial speech by Zelensky, reflecting the concrete conflicts in the ground and in the air today, suggested a possible future closer than we imagined possible to the old movie Terminator 3, which ends with the extinction of humanity.
Many times in the history of earth, the lead species has gone extinct (May 2001) due to major shifts in its food chain.
Human societies have often faced, and risen above, extreme centrifugal forces which threatened civilization. (Only now and in the Cold War did they threaten our very existence.) These kinds of conflicts have been studied deeply and scientifically, by people like Schelling, Raiffa and Axelrod, building on the fundamental mathematical truths in Von Neumann and Morgenstern. It is very exciting to some of us that Xi himself has often discussed the idea of “win-win” bargains, which echo Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict, the development of “tacit” (or open) social contracts building a ladder of win-win
arrangements allowing escape from minefields like the old Cold War and the bigger threats to humanity emerging today. In past centuries, there was a long series of social contracts, building up from crude beginnings like the twelve tablets of Rome, the Ten Commandments, Magna Carta and the legalisms of the Emperor Qin). As the means of production and destruction, the food chains, change, new social contracts are needed, at ever higher levels, in order to survive ever more powerful new technologies.
In order to balance a radically new situation, with AGI and humans and the natural world itself (“the noosphere” of our solar system) more and more dependent on each other and more and more empowered to destroy each other, what we need most is a NEW type or level of social contract, even for the very first simple level we need to survive life or death threats coming already in this decade, as Zelensky and the Terminator 3 movie warn us.
Because of the growing power of the Internet of Things (IOT) and of AGI, already far beyond what anyone speaking at the UN Security Council session accounted for, even the simplest most urgent win-win social contract must be built concrete AS AN INTERNET system, a shared internet platform organized around fundamental entities including humans, registered human organizations meeting certain standards, AGI, and interface to the noosphere itself with an expanded network of open secure sensors. Such sensors should include the kind of open, transparent global warning system, designed first to “see the sky” with higher resolution than any nation or group has ever deployed in the past. The technology which offers the most powerful hope to “see the sky” (in the usual light or radio bands) ascalled for in the theUN Security Council discussion of 2023 is given in Werbos and Hyland (2023).
As summarized in https://drpauljohn.blogspot.com/2025/04/from-golden-dome-to-new-jerusalem.html and in the white paper attached (published by USPTO in the patent approved for tQuA), the first step is to plan this kind of system for “seeing the sky”, following the July 2023 UN Security Council meeting.
Because Austria has housed the most advanced mathematical and scientific work building on the great traditions of Von Neumann and Raiffa, which saved us from the Last Cold War, and because it has world leaders in relevant advanced technology like that of the farthest future oriented frontiers, like Zielinger and Leitenstorfer, it is a logical base for trying to build up new internet platforms connecting the most advanced technologies from US and from China, who are already deploying radical new tools now combining both new hopes and new threats to human existence, even already in this decade.
The leaders of China, US and Russia are all strongly committed to preventing such wars, but all three countries possess strong components with AGI not fully under the level of control needed to prevent the worst. It is hoped that the new international society AGIST can be a useful tool for a new center in Austria, to strengthen these new human and cyber connections and the necessary new internet platform, the physical embodiment a new cybersocial contract.
A key challenge here in designing a new international hardware platform is to strengthen the side of defense. Many military planners believe that Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) is what prevented global war in the late twentieth century. This is a very serious misunderstanding of history, and of the work of John Von Neumann. In the kind of many player nonzerosum game we are facing now, strengthening defense – as in hardening the cybersecurity of power goods and monetary systems – is now becoming ever more serious and urgent. There has been great work in market design for electric power grids, using optimization methods to create win-win outcomes, of great value as an example for what new multiplayer foundations need to be.
One key parallel stream in such a new joint project would actually connect the best new technology capable of “seeing the sky” not just with electromagnetic sensing but in nuclear bands, as summarized in werbos (2025). There is hope that this project could also “see the earth” better, fully fulfilling the promise of the past collaboration of the great neuroscientist Walter Freeman and serious effective experimentation on “qi” in Nanjing. We need to see better, deeper and in greater depth for our tiny species to survive for long in the huge universe we are part of.
Prof. Ying (Gina) Tang
Rowan University
Title: Sense · Reason · Act: A neuro-symbolic framework for generalized autonomous systems
Bio: Dr. Ying (Gina) Tang is Professor and Undergraduate Program Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rowan University, New Jersey, USA. Her research centers on cyber-physical-social intelligence, with an emphasis on modeling and control for adaptation and personalization. Her work is supported by numerous federal agencies, including the NSF, US Army, FAA, EPA., as well as private foundations and industry partners. Dr. Tang holds three U.S. patents and has authored over 250 high-impact peer-reviewed publications. She is presently Senior Editor of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles, and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems and Springer’s Discover Artificial Intelligence. Dr. Tang received numerous awards, including the 2025 IEEE SMCS Outstanding Service to Humanity Award, the 2025 IFAC TC Award for Outstanding Achievement in Social Computing and Cyber Physical Social Systems, and the 2025 Rowan University Research Achievement Award.
Abstract: This talk presents a neuro-symbolic “playbook” for building generalized autonomous agents that operate across domains—from immersive classrooms to aviation and others. I’ll outline a practical architecture that couples foundation models (for perception and language) with structured reasoning layers (knowledge graphs, constraints, planners) and task tools (simulators, APIs). The framework manages complexity, diversity, and uncertainty in real time through perceptual models for sensing, ontologies that ground entities, relations, and rules, and Large Action Models (LAMs) that translate goals into executable task graphs and tool calls within a simulator-backed “Act” loop.
Prof. Hequan Sun
Xi’an Jiaotong University
Title: Parallel Seeds: Transforming Crop Breeding with Parallel Intelligence
Bio: Dr. Hequan Sun is currently a full professor with Xi’an Jiaotong University (XJTU). He is a member of CAA and IEEE. Before joining XJTU, he was a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research (Cologne, Germany) from Jan 2013 to Dec 2019, and at LMU Munich (Munich, Germany) from Jan 2019 to Feb 2023. He has been dedicated to interdisciplinary research between agriculture and engineering, during which he led a systematic analysis of genetic diversity at the population level for crops including potatoes, establishing a critical theoretical and technological foundation for the digital and intelligent molecular design breeding of crops. His work has been published in prestigious journals such as Nature (2025), IEEE/CAA JAS (2025), Nature Genetics (2022), and Nature Communications (2019), which has attracted wide interest from the academic community and media. Currently, his research is supported by two NSFC grants and the XJTU Young Top Talent Support Program (Category A). He actively contributes to the scientific community as a reviewer for high-impact journals, including those from Nature Publishing Group, Genome Biology, and Plant Biotechnology Journal.
Abstract: While essential for sustainable agriculture, conventional crop breeding is hindered by the limitations of its reductionist paradigm. We propose Parallel Seeds, a novel holistic framework that leverages parallel intelligence to transform the entire breeding cycle. This talk will present how recent breakthroughs in biotechnology, artificial intelligence and big data analytics have made this framework possible. Specifically, I will demonstrate how these advancements enable the construction of crop pangenomes and high-throughput phenotyping (in physical space). Overcoming these challenges paves the way for training powerful foundation models (FMs) using integrated genotypic and phenotypic data (in digital space). In turn, FMs provide data-driven optimal strategies to guide practical breeding. Parallel Seeds represents a paradigm shift from a linear, trial-and-error process to a predictive, parallel intelligence-driven engine, offering immense potential to accelerate sustainable agriculture.
Prof. Bai Li
East China Normal University
Title: Parallel Chefs: An Intelligent Cooking System Powered by Multimodal Large Language Models
Bio: Bai Li received his B.S. degree from Beihang University in 2013 and the Ph.D. degree from Zhejiang University in 2018. From 2018 to 2020, he worked at JD Inc., as a Research Engineer. From 2020 to 2025, he was an Associate Professor at Hunan University. Since April 2025, he has been a Full Professor at East China Normal University. He has published nearly 90 articles and four books in robotics and optimization. His research interests include computational optimal control, unmanned systems, parallel intelligence, and embodied intelligence. Bai Li was a recipient of the International Federation of Automatic Control 2014–2016 Best Journal Paper Prize from Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and the recipient of the 2022 Best Associate Editor Award of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles.
Abstract: This keynote presents our work on creating the next generation of intelligent cooking systems through the idea of the Parallel Chef. We began with pan-frying a steak, using multimodal large language models that process vision, sound, and temperature data to generate clear and adaptive cooking instructions. With fine-tuning and sensor feedback, the system learned to control doneness and consistency beyond manual trial and error. We then expanded to Chinese stir-fry dishes, where timing, heat, and seasoning must be coordinated, allowing the system to move from simple step-by-step guidance to managing continuous, rapid cooking actions. The result is the Parallel Chef framework, which brings together recipe generation, structured process design, and automated execution into a single platform that adapts to health needs, dietary choices, and kitchen settings while reducing errors. This talk will show how intelligent cooking can reshape daily food preparation and spark innovation across the food industry, pointing toward a future where creativity, personalization, and efficiency come together in one intelligent system.
