Talk 1 by Massimo Sacchi: Democratisation of Edge AI This talk brings Physical AI down from theory to the factory floor. It opens by framing Edge AI along two axes—edge versus cloud, and learned models versus traditional analytical rules—then walks through why industrial environments increasingly demand on-device intelligence.

Talk 2 by Stanley Chong: 20ms vs 2 Seconds: What a Safety Vest Taught Us About Choosing the Right Visual AI Not every vision problem needs a giant model — and not every giant model needs to see pixels the way you’d think. In this talk we’ll unpack the real differences between CNNs, Vision-Language Models (VLMs), and multimodal LLMs: what they’re each actually built to do, where their reasoning comes from, and why picking the wrong one costs you either accuracy or your latency budget.

Talk 3 by Dr Fangyi Zhang: Gentle Embodied AI: Vision- and Tactile-Based Robotic Manipulation for a Delicate World Modern robots excel at tasks demanding force, speed, and repeatability, yet they remain remarkably poor at gentleness – the careful, adaptive, contact-rich interaction required to handle fragile objects, manipulate deformable materials, or physically collaborate with people safely. This talk begins with vision-based manipulation and learning-based control – how robots can acquire visuo-motor skills, transfer them from simulation to the real world, and learn manipulation behaviours by watching human demonstrations.