Keynotes

Dr. Olena Zhu 

Head of AI solutions for consumer technologies 
Intel, USA

Right-Sizing AI Agents:
Adaptive Harnesses for Hybrid Intelligence

Biography

As AI agents move from the cloud to personal devices, one-size-fits-all orchestration no longer works. This keynote explores a new approach to hybrid agentic AI: dynamically matching the agent harness to the model’s capability, hardware constraints, and privacy needs. By giving smaller on-device models more structure, allowing stronger models more autonomy, and escalating safely when needed, this architecture makes AI agents faster, more private, and more reliable across the full spectrum of local and cloud intelligence.

Abstract

Dr. Olena (Jianfang) Zhu is Head of AI Solutions at Intel’s Client Computing Group, leading AI solution development for PC clients. She drives collaborations with global partners to build next-generation hybrid AI agents and platform, including Intel’s AI Assistant Builder (formerly Project SuperBuilder) for multi-agent, hybrid local & cloud AI. Dr. Zhu is also an Adjunct Professor at Purdue University. She has authored 50+ papers, holds 40+ U.S. patents, and is recognized with multiple industry awards.

Prof.  Hironori Washizaki

Waseda University, Japan
Past President, IEEE Computer Society 

Engineering Trustworthy Systems with Generative and Agentic AI: 
Requirements and Stakeholder Perspectives

Biography

Hironori Washizaki is a Professor and Associate Dean of the Research Promotion Division at Waseda University, and serves as a Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Informatics. He has served as a director and advisor to companies such as eXmotion and SI&C, effectively bridging academia and industry in computing, with a focus on software and AI engineering. Hironori is the Immediate Past President of the IEEE Computer Society and currently co-chairs both the IEEE TAB Ad Hoc Committee to Refine Budgeting Process and the CS Ad Hoc Committee on AI Strategy. His extensive technical leadership and IEEE governance experience includes roles as TAB Budget Process WG Chair and Editor of the IEEE-CS Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK Guide). He has received numerous honors, including the Computer Best Paper Award and the Spirit of the CS Award. Beyond his work with IEEE, Hironori contributes to international initiatives such as ISO/IEC. He has led many academia-industry joint research projects and large-scale funded projects in AI software engineering, and heads the SmartSE professional IoT/AI/DX education project. More information: http://www.washi.cs.waseda.ac.jp/washizaki/. 

Abstract

This keynote begins with the IEEE Megatrends 2030 Report, which forecasts breakthrough technologies highlighting the transformative role of AI as general-purpose infrastructure and trust, governance, and human–AI interaction as key enablers, with energy availability and efficiency as important constraints, and the IEEE Computer Society's Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK Guide) 4.0a, which reflects contemporary software engineering paradigms and emerging areas, including Agile and DevOps, software architecture, security, and AI. Building on these developments, the talk explores how AI can support the engineering of trustworthy systems while addressing diverse stakeholder concerns, particularly those related to trust and sustainability. It presents a comprehensive overview of generative and agentic AI approaches to requirements engineering, based on a systematic literature review. The review identifies reproducibility, hallucinations, and interpretability as interconnected challenges that can undermine the trustworthiness and consistency of AI-supported requirements engineering. The talk then presents recent advances in AI-empowered requirements engineering, including requirements negotiation and argumentation using multiple LLM agents. It also introduces LLM-based topic modeling and gap analysis to identify and analyze diverse stakeholder concerns, illustrated through a VR application case study. These approaches demonstrate how generative and agentic AI can move beyond assisting individual requirements activities toward supporting the analysis and negotiation of diverse stakeholder concerns. The talk concludes by discussing the implications of these developments for engineering trustworthy and sustainable consumer products and services, emphasizing the increasingly important role of requirements engineering in translating and reconciling technological capabilities, stakeholder needs, and broader societal concerns.

Dr. Albert Liu

Founder and CEO 
Kneron Inc.

The Future Lives at the Edge 

Biography

Albert Liu, Kneron’s founder and CEO. After graduating from the Taiwan National Cheng Kung University, he got the scholarships from Raytheon and the University of California to join the UC Berkeley/UCLA/UCSD research programs, and then got his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Before establishing Kneron in San Diego in 2015, He has worked in R&D and management positions in Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics R&D centre, MStar and Wireless Information.

Albert has been invited to give lectures of computer vision technology and artificial intelligence at the University of California, as well as to be a technical reviewer for many internationally renowned academic journals. In addition, Albert owned more than 30 international patents in the areas of artificial intelligence, computer vision and image processing. He has published more than 70 papers in major international journals. In 2020, published Deep Learning – Hardware design. In 2021, published Introduction to Artificial Intelligence 4th Industrial Revolution.
Moreover, Albert has received numerous awards such as 2021 IEEE TCAS Darlington award, 2022 Pan Wen-Yuan Foundation IoT Innovation Award, 2022 IEEE CTSoc Awards Corporate Innovation Leadership Award.

Abstract

As AI computing outpaces Moore’s Law, unsustainable data center energy consumption demands a shift to the Edge. This presentation explores the evolution of NPU-driven architectures, demonstrating how decentralized edge processing achieves exceptional energy efficiency, offline reliability, and privacy protection, ultimately shaping the next wave of global AI infrastructure.

Organizers