Invited Speakers
Prof. Agnieszka Wykowska
Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa (Italy)Professor Agnieszka Wykowska is the head of the unit “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction” at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), in Genoa, Italy. She is also the Coordinator of the Center for Human Technologies, at the IIT. Her background is Cognitive Neuroscience (2006), Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU). She obtained a PhD in psychology (2008) from the LMU. In 2016 she was awarded the ERC Starting grant “InStance: Intentional Stance for Social Attunement”. She is Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Social Robotics. Since July 2022 she serves in the role of President of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN). She is also board member of Association of ERC Grantees and a delegate to the European Research Area (ERA) Forum – an EU expert group shaping EU science policies. Her research focuses are interdisciplinary, bridging psychology, cognitive neuroscience, robotics and healthcare. She combines cognitive neuroscience methods with human-robot interaction to understand the human brain mechanisms in interaction with other humans and with technology.
TITLE: Humans and robots in the context of sharing a task – joint action and sense of joint agency
ABSTRACT: As humans, we do not act in a social vacuum and most of our actions require coordination with others in space and time to achieve a goal. A crucial aspect of interacting with others is the experience of a sense of joint agency (SoJA). When one performs an action together with someone – for example, a piano duet –one can form a sense of joint agency with their partner, meaning that they will perceive the sounds coming out of the instrument as a result of joint control over those sounds, regardless of who in the dyad actually pressed the specific key producing a specific sound. It is not obvious whether we form a sense of joint agency also with robots. In this talk, I will present a series of studies where we investigated how mechanisms involved in adaptation in joint action (such as sense of joint action) depend on various contextual factors, such as belief in the intentional agency of the robot.
Prof. ALESSANDRO DI NUOVO
Sheffield Hallam University (UK)Alessandro Di Nuovo is Professor of Machine Intelligence at the Department of Computing, Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) since May 2020. Since January 2020, He is also research lead of the Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre’s (AWRC) theme AI, Robotics, and Digital which is dedicated to put the people at the centre of the AI revolution via responsible research and innovation in emerging technologies to improve health and wellbeing. Prof. Di Nuovo has led a portfolio of EU and UKRI funded projects worth over €3 million. His projects can be categorised into two main research and innovation streams: Neuro-developmental Robotics, which is an area of fundamental research on how machines can learn by simulating child-like brains that can be embodied into humanoid robots and then educated and develop their cognitive skills like children; Socially Assistive Robotics, which is an area of societal impact of artificial intelligence and robotics that aims at supporting healthcare and social workers in the care of children, older adults and disabled.
TITLE: How can adaptive social robots help develop human-centred services to benefit society?
ABSTRACT: The talk will showcase the latest research results and provide an overview of state-of-the-art developments in social robotics. The lecture will highlight the benefits and limitations of this technology and its potential breakthroughs, while emphasising responsible research that empowers people instead of replacing them. Recent technological advances are stimulating the growth of AI, which is becoming ever more accessible for use in the real world. Advanced robotic platforms offer new ways for developing new AI services to benefit society. These robots provide a physical body that is a key component of the cognitive process, which can help create more capable intelligent agents with social abilities. One emerging field of research is neuro-robotics, which combines computational intelligence, neuroscience, and robotics to create artificial models of minds with human-like learning abilities based on biological cognition. Multidisciplinary research in health and wellbeing has shown these advanced robots can be designed to transform lives by providing individualised assistance to people, such as children with autism or older adults with cognitive decline, while also collecting information that can be used to provide personalised quality care.
DR. SALVATORE ANZALONE
Université Paris 8 (Paris)Salvatore Maria Anzalone is Maître de Conférences at Université Paris 8 and member of the Artificial and Human Cognitions Laboratory (2016), leading the Cognition and Social Interactions group (2020). He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Palermo (2010). He has collaborated since then with several institutions in Italy (University of Padua), Japan (Osaka University) and France (Sorbonne Université and Pitié-Salpêtrière Medical Hospital). His research interests focus on Social Robotics, spanning from the analysis of interpersonal dynamics to the development of socio-cognitive behaviors, with the goal of allowing robots to express high degrees of social intelligence. He extensively worked on such topics in the specific context of socially assistive robotics for children with neurodevelopmental disorders. He was awarded as JSPS Research Fellow from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2011-2012) and recipient of a grant from the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (2013). He participated in several national and European projects such as the FP7 Michelangelo. He is currently coordinator of the French-Swiss bilateral project ANR-FNS iReCheck, co-coordinator of the French national EUR ArTeC project “Scène and Robotique” and, since 2017, part of the steering committee of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics group of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence. Since 2021, he is managing editor of the Springer’s International Journal of Social Robotics.
TITLE: Social Artificial Agents for children with Neurodevelopmental Deficits
ABSTRACT: Endowing agents with socio-cognitive abilities poses two primary challenges: understanding the dynamics of human social interactions; developing skills that explicitly consider the human presence in the agent's perception-cognition-action loop. In this presentation, I will show how a social agent can deal with people’s mental states as well with its owns by leveraging fundamental socio-cognitive skills such as engagement, imitation, joint attention, and perspective taking, together with a nuanced characterization and modeling of individual differences among humans. Over the past decade, social agents have been employed to support children with Neuro-Developmental Deficits, where such social skills are impaired. In these cases, social agents can provide continuous, intensive, and long-term care for children. I will focus, in particular, on their application in school settings, where social agents can serve as tools to customize teaching strategies and intensive therapies to meet the unique needs of children.