We are very happy and honored to have these experts joining the workshop as keynote speakers!
Dr Oya Celiktutan is a Reader in AI and Robotics in the Department of Engineering at King’s College London, where she leads the Social AI & Robotics Laboratory. She is also the Honorary Robotics Lead at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust.
Her research focuses on multimodal machine learning for autonomous robots and virtual agents that interact naturally with humans, including multimodal perception, human behaviour understanding and prediction, and socially aware navigation and manipulation. Her work has been supported by EPSRC, The Royal Society, and EU Horizon, as well as industrial partners.
She received the EPSRC New Investigator Award in 2020, and her team has won several awards, including Best Paper at IEEE RO-MAN 2022 and recognition at IEEE FG 2021 and the ICCV UDIVA Challenge 2021. She is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction.
More information on Oya's research
Jouke Verlinden is a Professor at the Faculty of Design Sciences, Department of Product Development, University of Antwerp, focusing on product design, XR/digital fabrication, and running projects on craftsmanship 4.0. He is affiliated with the Augmented Crafting Lab and the Antwerp Design Factory.
After a career in the business world as an information designer and UI expert, Jouke returned to academia to earn a Ph.D. and a professorship in interactive computer graphics (Delft University of Technology, Industrial Design). He collaborated with artists such as Iris van Herpen (3D-printed dresses) and Joris Laarman (3D-printed bridge) and currently focuses primarily on how human creativity can be enhanced in various contexts.
Concerning my past research project at IIT (iCub Lab, Prof. Sandini/Dr. Sciutti/Dr. Rea) I am willing to share with you my acknowledgment in an open interview format with some short movies about how to conjugate and possibly combine dance with humanoid robot technologies.
My focus was to elucidate the fundamental sensory-motor-cognitive problems that are required by humans as well as humanoid robots for learning, memorizing, and executing skilled movements: ultimately a way for a cooperating communication. In this context I had really to re-compose and re-combine my motion knowledge, almost a dance-spelling, in order to cancel the separation between human dancer and humanoid robot. All along my time at IIT I started to have a kind of empathic interaction with iCub, a child robot who, as many kids, likes to play but, if overwhelmed by too many stimuli, may give up playing and freezes out. I quickly learned to act and work in a quite polite manner, with the purpose to transmit a feeling of respect and care.
Martina Morasso is an Italian professional dancer, choreograph, and movement trainer based in Dresden, Germany. Her artistic career includes training and competitions in classic and modern dance as well as artistic gymnastics and ballet. Martina holds i.a. a B.A. degree on Theater Activities/Modern Literature (Genova University, Italy), a Diplom as Stage Dancer at the Ballettakademie/Institut für Bühnentanz in Cologne, Germany, and conducted postgraduate studies in Choreography at the Palucca School in Dresden, Germany. As a freelancer, she collaborated successfully across theaters and dance institutes (e.g., TanzNetz Dresden, Oper Leipzig, Landestheater Niederbayern) but her work received international recognition through rewards from Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Germany. Also scientifically, Martina had been speaker i.a. at the "Festival della Scienza", Genova, Italy, and "Movement and Cognition Congress", Oxford, UK.