Ravishankar K. Iyer is the George and Ann Fisher Distinguished Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with joint appointments in the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Computer Science (CS) in the Coordinated Science Laboratory (CSL), the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology. He was the founding chief scientist of the Information Trust Institute at UIUC—a campus-wide research center addressing the security, reliability, and safety of critical infrastructures. His work has been recognized by several awards from the IEEE, ACM, and AIAA, among others. He leads the DEPEND Group at CSL/ECE at Illinois, with a multidisciplinary focus on systems and ML that combine deep measurement-driven analytics and applications spanning performance, resilience, and the security of critical infrastructures. Prof. Iyer is a Fellow of the IEEE, ACM, and AAAS.

Farnood Merrikh-Bayat is CTO and Principal Investigator at Mentium Technologies, where he leads the development of Mentium’s ultra-efficient and rad-hard AI accelerators for space, defense, and edge applications. With over 16 years of experience in semiconductor design, computer architecture, embedded systems, and artificial intelligence, he specializes in ultra-low-power AI accelerators, radiation-tolerant electronics, and autonomous onboard processing. He has led numerous government-funded R&D programs supporting NASA and the U.S. defense community and currently oversees development of the Luna family of AI co-processors designed for deployment in resource-constrained and mission-critical environments including deep space.