Bio: Dr. Fiona Hua is currently leading the research and product development of perception techniques and data platform at Sea Machines - a startup company focusing on autonomous navigation in the ocean surface. Dr. Hua's team is responsible for building the AI empowered advanced situational awareness system, as well as building data infrastructure on data offload, data management and MLOps platform. Before that, Dr. Hua has been focusing on products in face/iris detection and liveness detection delivering products to banks authentication, law enforcement and border controls.

Dr. Fiona Hua received her PhD from Clarkson University focusing on Biometrics. Before that she received her MS in Control Theory and Control Engineering, and BS in Automation.

Bio: Charlie Tyson is the Technology Activation Manager for Michigan’s Office of Future Mobility & Electrification (OFME). Launched in early 2020, the office works across state government, academia, and private industry to enhance Michigan’s mobility ecosystem, including developing dynamic mobility and electrification policies and supporting the startup and scale up of emerging technologies and businesses.

In his role, Charlie develops and nurtures relationships with key mobility and technology stakeholders, including corporates, startups, investors, academia, municipalities, and government agencies. Through his work with OFME, Charlie connects emerging mobility companies to Michigan’s advanced transportation industry through testing and pilot opportunities, matchmaking engagements, and public-private partnerships.

As OFME’s Technology Activation Manager, Charlie plays an integral role in the Michigan Mobility Funding Platform, a grant program to assist local and global companies in deploying, validating, and scaling their technology addressing challenges related to the movement of people and goods by air, land, or sea. In addition to curating real-world deployments addressing industry and community mobility challenges, Charlie oversees OFME’s network of test site partners who offer key capabilities to prove out early-stage technologies in a confined environment.

In his free time, Charlie enjoys traveling, being active outdoors with his dog, and spending time along the Great Lakes.

Bio: Chunming Qiao is a SUNY Distinguished Professor of CSE at University at Buffalo. His current research foci includes connected and autonomous vehicles, smart transportation systems, mobile systems, and quantum data networks. He has published extensively with an h-index of 75. Several of his papers have received the best paper awards from IEEE and Joint ACM/IEEE venues. He also has 7 US patents and served as an IT consultant for several organizations. His research has been funded by a dozen of federal and state agencies as well as IT companies, and featured in BusinessWeek, Wireless Europe, CBC and New Scientists. He was elected to IEEE Fellow for his contributions to optical and wireless network architectures and protocols.

Bio: Luke Harvey is a Principal Partner Solution Architect at Amazon Web Services. He is globally responsible for AWS’s automotive partner strategy and enables partners to build, market, and sell their state-of-the-art solutions leveraging the cloud. He has over a decade of automotive leadership experience in autonomous and connected vehicle technology. When not building things on AWS, he spends time beekeeping with his family in Oakland County.