Marco Coraggio

Scuola Superiore Meridionale - School for Advanced Studies, Italy

Talk: Coordination and Synchronization in Complex Human Networks: Past, Present, and Perspectives

Understanding and enhancing coordination within complex human networks is a multifaceted challenge with implications for human-robot interaction, augmented reality, and collaborative environments, with application to healthcare, sports training, and manufacturing. This talk explores the dynamics of intentional and unintentional coordination in human groups performing periodic tasks. Initially, we discuss and compare historical and recent paradigmatic experimental setups like the "rocking chairs", the "human dynamic clamp", and the "mirror game", and how they informed the modeling of emergent behavior via nonlinear oscillators such as the Haken-Kelso-Bunz (HKB) oscillator and the Kuramoto network model. Currently, a crucial challenge is the design of so-called "cognitive architectures" to drive autonomous avatars capable of seamless integration into human groups. These architectures typically aim to mimic human-like dynamics, enhance group coordination, and encode information in kinematics. We will present both model-based and machine-learning-based state-of-the-art control strategies to achieve such goals, and conclude by highlighting the most relevant open problems.

Bio: Marco Coraggio is an Assistant Professor at Scuola Superiore Meridionale - School for Advanced Studies, Italy. He received his Ph.D. in Information Technology and Electrical Engineering from the University of Naples Federico II in 2020. He completed his M.Sc. in Automation Engineering in 2016 and his B.Sc. in 2013, both with highest honors (110/110 cum laude) from the same institution. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Scuola Superiore Meridionale (2021-2024) and the University of Naples Federico II (2020-2021). He held visiting positions at the University of California Santa Barbara (2019), Tokyo Institute of Technology (2023), Linköping University (2023), and the University of Bristol (2016). He won the 2023 IEEE CSS Italy Young Author Best Paper Award. He was a finalist for the 2022 IEEE CSS Italy Young Author Best Paper Award. He serves as Associate Editor for the European Control Conference (2023-2025).