Keynote Speakers
Insights from global visionaries at the forefront of AI and Systems Engineering
Dr. Rajeev Rastogi
VP and Head of Research @ Amazon India
Rajeev Rastogi is the Vice President of Machine Learning (ML) for Amazon’s International Stores business. He leads the development of ML solutions in the areas of Search, Advertising, Deals, Catalog Quality, Payments, Forecasting, Question Answering, Grocery Grading, etc. Previously, he was Vice President of Yahoo! Labs Bangalore and the founding Director of the Bell Labs Research Center in Bangalore, India. Rajeev is an ACM Fellow and a Bell Labs Fellow. He has published over 125 papers, and holds over 100 patents. He currently serves on the editorial board of the CACM, and has been an Associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering in the past. Rajeev received his B. Tech degree from IIT Bombay, and a PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas, Austin..
In this talk, I will first present a brief overview of AI applications in E-Commerce across customer experience, seller experience, catalog quality, operations, ads, and payments. I will then talk about three key learnings to develop high-performance AI applications – leverage global structure, fine-tune smaller models with application-specific data, and ingest rich feature representations during fine-tuning. Finally, I will describe three pieces of work underlying our learnings – 1) Asymmetric recommendations using GNNs with dual embeddings, 2) Visual Question Answering (VQA) using Vision Language Models (VLMs) fine-tuned with E-Commerce data, and 3) Joint shadow generation and relighting using bridge matching conditioned on light-geometry interaction (LGI) maps.
Prof. Michele Magno
Professor & Head of Edge AI and Sensing Lab @ ETH Zurich
Michele Magno (Fellow Member, IEEE) is Professor and Head of the Project-Based Learning Center at ETH Zurich, where he also leads the Edge AI and Sensing Lab. In 2026, he will be Head of the Edge AI and Sensing Lab at the Italian Institute of Artificial Intelligence, conducting transformative, application-oriented research contributing to innovation and industrial transformation.
His research focuses on wireless sensor networks, wearable systems, edge machine learning, smart sensing, and autonomous robots. With over 400 publications, he has established strong partnerships with industry leaders including IBM Research, Sony, STMicroelectronics, and Ferrari.
Recent advances in sensing technologies and edge artificial intelligence are enabling a new generation of intelligent systems capable of operating directly in the physical world with low latency, reduced energy consumption, and increased autonomy. This talk presents advances in sensing and edge AI technologies for intelligent embedded systems, ranging from wearable devices to autonomous robots, highlighting hardware-software co-design approaches that enable real-time AI directly on battery-operated platforms.