Keynote Speakers
Cosimo Della Santina, TU Delft (Netherlands) - DLR (Germany)
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Bio: Cosimo Della Santina is Assistant Professor at TU Delft and Research Scientist at the German Aerospace Institute (DLR). He received his Ph.D. in robotics (cum laude, 2019) from the University of Pisa. He was a visiting Ph.D. student and a postdoc (2017 to 2019) at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was a senior postdoc (2020) and guest lecturer (2021) at the Department of Informatics, Technical University of Munich (TUM). Cosimo has been awarded euRobotics Georges Giralt Ph.D. Award (2020), the “Fabrizio Flacco” Young Author Award of I-RAS (2019), and he has been a finalist for the European Embedded Control Institute Ph.D. award (2020). In 2023, he received the IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation. He is PI for TU Delft of the European Projects Natural Intelligence and EMERGE, co-director of the Delft AI Lab SELF, and involved in a number of Dutch projects. His research interest is in providing motor intelligence to physical systems, focusing on elastic and soft robots.
Josie Hughes, EPFL (Switzerland)
Designing Robots for Human Interaction
Abstract: As the societal needs for robot to operate close to, or around humans grows we must consider what are the guiding principles and technologies driving 'human friendly' robots. In this talk I will explore different methodologies and approaches to defining 'human friendly' and also technology developments that enable this, including soft and bio-inspired manipulators and also sensory systems and wearable devices.
Bio: Josie Hughes is an Assistant Professor at EPFL where she established the CREATE Lab in the Institute of Mechanical Engineering in 2021. She undertook her undergraduate, masters and PhD studies at the University of Cambridge, joining the Bio-inspired Robotics Lab (BIRL). Her PhD focused on examining the role of passivity in bio-inspired manipulators, and methodologies for exploiting morphology soft large area soft sensing. Following this, she worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in USA in the Distributed Robotics Lab. Her research focuses on developing novel design paradigms for designing robot structures that exploit their physicality and interactions with the environment. This includes the development of robotic hands, soft manipulators and automation systems for applications focused on sustainability and science. Her group explores applications for agri-food, human collaboration, robot scientists and also environmental monitoring. Her work has been published in journals including Science Robotics and Nature Machine Intelligence, and she has won numerous International Robotics Competitions Awards.
Abderrahmane Kheddar, CNRS AIST (Japan) - LIRMM (France)
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Bio: Professor Abderrahmane Kheddar received the B.S. degree in computer science from the Institut National d’Informatique, Algiers, Algeria, in 1990, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in robotics from Pierre et Marie Curie University, Sorbonne University, Paris, France in 1993 and 1997, respectively. In 2008, he created the CNRS-AIST Joint Robotic Laboratory, an International Research Laboratory, located in Tsukuba, Japan, where he was the Director from 2008 to 2016 and Codirector from 2017 to 2021. In 2010 he also created and led the Interactive Digital Humans team until 2020, with the Laboratory of Computer Science, Robotics and Microelectronics of Montpellier, CNRS, University of Montpellier, France. His research interests include haptics, humanoids, and related bionics. He is a Founding Member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Chapter on Haptics, and the Co-Chair and Founding Member of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Model-Based Optimization. He is a Member of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Brain Initiative, an Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, and a Founding Member and the Deputy Editor-in-Chief for Cyborg and Bionics System. He was an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, from 2013 to 2018. He is a Founding Member of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics and was in its Editorial Board from 2007 to 2010. Since 2020 he is the lead of the bionics initiative at CARTIGEN, University Hospital of Montpellier. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association and Vice-President of the International Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance (AIIA). He is a Full Member of the National Academy of Technology of France and a Knight of the National Order of Merits of France.
Silvia Rossi, University of Naples "Federico II" (Italy)
Title: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Bio: Silvia Rossi is an Associate Professor at University of Naples Federico II, where she is the scientific director of the PRISCA Lab (https://www.prisca.unina.it). She received the M.Sc. degree in Physics from the University of Naples Federico II, Italy, in 2001, and the Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technologies from the University of Trento, Italy, in 2006. She is an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Int. Journal of Social Robotics, Pattern Recognition Letters, and Intelligent Service Robotics. She has been involved in several EU and non-EU projects. She is currently the PI and coordinator of the MSCA-ITN-2020 PERSEO, PI of the HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-DN project TRAIL, PI of the CHIST-ERA IV project COHERENT, and Coordinator of the national PRIN project ADVISOR. She was the general chair of RO-MAN 2020 and 2022 and is in the program committee of several international conferences on human-robot interaction and AI. Her research interests include Socially Assistive Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Architectures, and User Profiling and Recommender Systems. Her main research activities aim at the investigation of computational approaches for autonomous agents’ behaviors able to interact and support people by extracting meaningful information to model the user and to adapt the agent behavior. She published more than 180 papers in international journals, books, and conferences.