Invited Speakers
Prof. GIULIO SANDINI
Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa (Italy)Giulio Sandini is a Founding Director of the Italian Institute of Technology where in 2006 he established the department of Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences. As a research fellow and Assistant Professor at the Scuola Normale in Pisa and Visiting Researcher at the Neurology Department of the Harvard Medical School he investigated visual perception and sensorimotor coordination in humans and technologies for Brain Activity Mapping in children with learning disabilities. As a professor of bioengineering at the University of Genova in 1990 he founded the LIRA-Lab (Laboratory for Integrated Advanced Robotics) which was to become the birthplace of the iCub humanoid robot. In 1996 he was Visiting Scientist at the Artificial Intelligence Lab of MIT.
Giulio Sandini research activity is characterized by an engineering approach to the study of natural intelligent systems with a focus on the design and implementation of artificial systems to investigate the development of human perceptual, motor and cognitive abilities (and viceversa).
TITLE: The role of Imagination in Social Interaction
ABSTRACT: The use mathematical models to describe human perceptual and motor functions has a very long and successful history while the design and implementation of embodied artificial systems to investigate human sensorimotor and cognitive abilities is a relatively recent endeavour struggling, to some extent, to go beyond a superficial, technology-driven, biomimetic approach. Besides its intrinsic scientific and engineering value, the view emerging is that of a fragmented collection of individual functions missing the opportunity to exploit the origin and timeframe of human adaptive abilities including the role and complementary contribution of evolutionary, epigenetic, developmental and learning processes.
Stemming from these considerations and on the need of a more convergent approach based on a reference cognitive architecture I will focus my presentation on how to exploit the use of robots to advance our knowledge of the mechanisms at the basis of human-human interaction and in particular in our ability to anticipate our own actions and those of others. I will argue that robots as experimental tools to investigate embodied intelligence and the cognitive aspects of social interaction, can be exploited not only as physical models of biological systems but, more interestingly, as experimental platforms to investigate aspects of social interactions such as the kinematic and dynamic signatures of motor contagion, turn taking, vitality forms and emotions.
Prof. BARBARA BRUNO
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne (Switzerland)Barbara Bruno is a post-doc researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland, deputy head of the CHILI lab, with research interest in Socially Assistive Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction. She is co-founder of the start-up company Teseo, Italy. Barbara received the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of Genoa in 2011 and 2015, respectively. She is part of the Swiss nationwide NCCR Robotics organisation and currently involved in the EU ITN ANIMATAS and the Swiss-French research project iReCHeCk. In 2017-2019 she was Technical Manager of the H2020 project CARESSES, and she has been Visiting Scholar at Örebro University (Sweden), with the Italian-Swedish project WEARAMI. She has published more than 45 articles in international journals and peer-reviewed international conferences.
TITLE: User modelling in Socially Assistive Robotics: two case studies
ABSTRACT: Older adults and children are the preferred users of Socially Assistive Robots, typically in the context of applications aiming to retain/foster their cognitive capabilities. In such cases, user modelling is key to ensure the effectiveness of the robot, yet complicated by the dynamic nature of those two phases of life. In this talk, I will discuss the approaches adopted for user modelling in two projects, one targeting older adults and the other primary school children, with their characteristics, pros and cons and outcomes, to contribute to the identification of better solutions, enabling better assistive technologies.