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Keynote Speakers

IEEE COINS 2026 features 4 invited keynote lectures from leading researchers and innovators in intelligent systems.

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Luca Benini
University of Bologna, Italy — ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Monday, September 7, 2026 · 09:00 – 10:00 CEST
Designing Digital Platforms for Wearable Contextual Intelligence
Wearable devices are evolving toward smart, context-aware digital assistants by leveraging rapidly increasing generative AI capabilities on device, at the extreme edge. Running multimodal generative AI models on a wearable device requires tackling major challenges in model distillation, as well as in energy and latency aware hardware-software platform design. In this talk I will explore model-to-chip design for wearable contextual intelligence, focusing on brain inspired heterogeneous computing with multi-domain acceleration.
Speaker Bio

Luca Benini holds the chair of Digital Circuits and Systems at ETH Zurich and is Full Professor at the University of Bologna. His research interests span from ultra-low power integrated circuit and system design to multi-core SoC design, machine learning for embedded systems, and brain-inspired neuromorphic computing.

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Vijay Janapa Reddi
Harvard University, USA
Tuesday, September 8, 2026 · 09:00 – 10:00 CEST
From Omni Layer AI to AI Engineering: Why Intelligent Systems Need a Discipline
AI spans the computing stack from in-memory hardware and chiplets to cloud models, agentic autonomy, and safety deployments. Conferences like COINS unite these layers, yet intellectual foundations fragment: hardware optimizes efficiency, systems scale operations, agentic AI enhances reasoning, responsible AI governs ethics. Lacking cross-layer abstractions and lifecycle evaluations, progress stalls. AI Engineering emerges as the solution, integrating all via shared frameworks, reproducibility, and deployment principles — treating systems as impactful infrastructures. Pillars include abstractions, evaluations, benchmarking, and education. Goal: trustworthy, scalable intelligence. Key question: Can we engineer omni-layer AI responsibly at scale?
Speaker Bio

Vijay Janapa Reddi is an Associate Professor at Harvard University. His research spans mobile and edge computing, machine learning systems, and AI benchmarking. He is co-founder of MLCommons and a key contributor to the MLPerf benchmarking suite.

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Elisa Ricci
University of Trento — Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Wednesday, September 9, 2026 · 09:00 – 10:00 CEST
Trustworthy AI
Full abstract to be announced. This keynote will address key challenges and research directions in building trustworthy AI systems — covering fairness, robustness, interpretability, and safe deployment in real-world scenarios.
Speaker Bio

Elisa Ricci is Full Professor at the University of Trento and a researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK). Her research focuses on computer vision and machine learning, with emphasis on domain adaptation, continual learning, and trustworthy AI.

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Valeria Tomaselli
SW Design Senior Team Leader, STMicroelectronics
Tuesday, September 8, 2026 · 13:00 – 13:45 CEST
Industrial Keynote — TBA
Full details to be announced. Industrial keynote from STMicroelectronics.
Speaker Bio

Valeria Tomaselli is SW Design Senior Team Leader at STMicroelectronics, with expertise in embedded AI and edge intelligence for consumer and industrial applications.