Speakers

Andrew J. S. Hamilton is a Fellow of JILA, and Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he has been since 1986. He has done research on Black Holes, Cosmology, and Astrophysics in general. His current focus is on what really happens inside astronomically realistic black holes. He is known for his general relativistic visualizations of black holes, which have appeared widely on TV, on the internet, and in other venues.

Wilder is an entrepreneur, inventor, and research engineer based in Europe. He is currently the Chief Architect for Machine Learning at Graphstax, a US-based company building neurosymbolic artificial-intelligence (AI) products to leverage information buried deep in enterprise data. Back in 2018 he was co-founder and CTO of Upstride (acquired by ContentSquare in July 2021), a startup that optimized the performance of neural networks (NNs) via the use of Clifford (Geometric) Algebras. His interests include AI, signal processing, Clifford Algebras, computer vision, integrated-circuits design, and high-performance computing.

Professor Emeritus of the UPC, at the DMAT, and visitor of the BSC 2019-2021, he was Full Professor of Information and Coding Theory (UPC, 1993-2015), Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Statistics (2003-2009) and Vice-Rector for Information and Documentation Systems (1998-2002). He was president of the Catalan Mathematical Society SCM (1995-2002) and of the Executive Committee of the 3rd European Congress of Mathematics of the European Mathematical. In the period 1989-1993 was Full Professor of Algebraic Geometry in the UCM and be-fore Associate Professor of the UB in the Department of Geometry and Topology. He has organized several conferences, has published ten books, and in 2019 he was awarded the Medal of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society (Pro meritis ad mathematicam artem spectantibus) and in 2020 the Narcís Monturiol Medal of the Catalan Government (For scientific and technological merit).

Dietmar Hildenbrand is a lecturer at the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universität Darmstadt. He is one of the codevelopers of GAALOP (Geometic Algebra Algorithms Optimizer) a software package used to optimize geometric algebra files, and his research interests include geometric algebra, robotics, game engines, computer graphics, quantum computing and high-performance parallel computing. He has published the books “The Power of Geometric Algebra Computing: for Engineering and Quantum Computing”, “Introduction to Geometric Algebra Computing”, and “Foundations of Geometric Algebra Computing”. The European Society of Computational Methods in Sciences and Engineering awarded Dietmar Hildenbrand with the highest distinction of Honorary Fellowship for his outstanding contribution in the field of Applied Mathematics (September 2012). In 2015 the HSA foundation made his Geometric Algebra Computing technology a part of their ecosystem.

Leo Dorst is with the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam. He received his MSc and PhD in the applied physics of computer vision from Delft University, and started his work on geometrical issues in robotics at Philips Laboratories, NY, USA, where he developed robot path planning algorithms (cast into 12 patents). His passion since 1997 is geometric algebra; he is coauthor of the introductory book “Geometric Algebra for Computer Science” (2009) and co-editor of several topical collections. His current interests are Plane-Based Geometric Algebra, and Morphological Neural Networks.

Joan Lasenby is Professor of Image and Signal Analysis in the Signal Processing and Communications Group of the Cambridge University Engineering Department, where she is also Head of Graduate Studies and Deputy Head of Department. She is (co)-author of over 200 peer reviewed articles, has jointly edited two books of conference proceedings, and served on the Organising Committees of many international conferences and workshops. She has supervised more than 20 PhD theses.
Her research interests include applications of Geometric Algebra in engineering, image processing and image coding, 3D reconstruction in computer vision with particular applications in healthcare, and machine learning.

G. Stacey Staples is a professor of mathematics at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His research focuses on combinatorial properties and applications of Clifford algebras, particularly as related to algebraic probability, graph theory, and symbolic computation. He has authored or co-authored more than 40 research publications, including two books: Operator Calculus on Graphs (Theory and Applications to Computer Science) (w/ René Schott), published in 2012 by Imperial College Press, and Clifford Algebras and Zeons (Geometry to Combinatorics and Beyond), published in 2019 by World Scientific Publishing.

Alyn Rockwood is Chief Scientist at Boulder Graphics, developing 3D visualization. Until recently, he was Professor of Mathematics and Associate Director of the Geometric Modeling and Scientific Visualization Research Center at King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. He has received several teaching awards, the COFES 2007 Innovation in Technology Award, and the CAD Society “Heroes of Engineering” Award. He recently received SIGGRAPH’s Outstanding Service Award. His current research is focused on developing new modeling techniques for geometric design and animation, and engineering applications of Geometric Algebra. He was instrumental in introducing Geometric Algebra to the Computer Graphics community via courses he organized at SIGGRAPH 2000 and 2001. He is also authoring his third novel, and likes to create math-based artworks. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Werner Benger is technical director at AHM GmbH (since 2014), an Austrian-based company developing software for processing and analysing huge, high-resolution geoscientific data utilizing methods inspired by general relativity and geometric algebra. These design concepts originated out of prior work on visualizing numerical relativity as part of a cooperation project between the Max-Planck-Institute for Gravitational Physics in Potsdam and the Zuse-Institute Berlin (1997-2005; PhD from Free University Berlin, 2004). He has further refined those mathematical and computational concepts during practical work on scientific visualization of hurricanes, computational fluid dynamics and more at the Center for Computation & Technology at Louisiana State University (2005-2013).

Todd Ell is a Technical Fellow at Collins Aerospace in Burnsville Minnesota. He received his BSEE and MSEE degrees from the University of North Dakota and a PhD in Control Science and Dynamic Systems from the University of Minnesota. Todd is involved in the design of guidance, navigation, and control (GNC) systems, as well as signal & image processing algorithms for other avionics products. He has authored or co-authored 40 research publications, including a textbook in quaternion Fourier transforms for signal & image processing. He has over 40 patents granted, with many more in application. As a Collin’s Fellow he fosters technical excellence and applies technical expertise to difficult problems, ensures technical leadership in the aerospace industry, promotes professional growth, and strengthens the technical expert career path. Being a thought leader, he provides technical vision and cross-divisional collaboration. He is currently engaged in an adaptation program seeking to foster the use of geometric algebra modeling and analysis techniques to ‘all things aerospace.’

Daniel Apon is currently a Cryptography Lead at MITRE in McLean, VA and a Visiting Professor at University of Maryland, College Park. He previously received a Bachelor’s degree in Business Management from the University of Arkansas in 2008, a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Arkansas in 2011, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science with a focus on Cryptography from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2017. After that, he held a Postdoctoral Scholar position at the University of California, Berkeley for a year, then joined the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from 2018 to 2022. At NIST, Daniel was “the lattice guy” during the main bulk of the Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization project. His current research interests primarily focus on Lattice Cryptography, Post-Quantum Cryptography, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (and other advanced cryptographic constructions from lattices), as well as Cryptanalysis broadly-speaking — both theoretical and applied.

Tristan Müller is a quantum hardware developer at IBM Germany Research and Development GmbH. In his current position, he is working on IBMs quantum computer control electronics to facilitate larger and more robust quantum computers.
He previously received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics from RWTH Aachen University.
During his master’s thesis at the JARA-Institute for Quantum Information he was working on the application of superconducting circuits for magnetic sensing.
Afterwards, Tristan obtained his PhD in Physics from the Max-Planck-Institute of Microstructure Physics in Halle, focusing on the simulation of ultrafast and ultra long-range phenomena.

Dr. Nektarios Valous is a research associate at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and the National Center for Tumor Diseases (NCT) Heidelberg. He has research experience in the fields of computational biomedicine and interdisciplinary physics. He is the founding and executive editor of the peer-reviewed journal ImmunoInformatics (Elsevier). In the last few years, he is (co-)organizing American Mathematical Society (AMS) special sessions on computational biomedicine at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM). He is currently working on the development of color image processing workflows for natural and biomedical images in the hypercomplex domain, and the development of quaternion deep learning pipelines for biomedical image segmentation and classification.