The Speakers

Luis Sentis is an Associate Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin and General Dynamics Endowed Faculty Fellow. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University where he was also a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Computer Science Department. He was a La Caixa Foundation Fellow while at Stanford. He holds a B.S. degree in Telecommunications and Electronics Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Before Stanford, he worked in Silicon Valley as a Control Systems Engineer.

In Austin, he leads the Human Centered Robotics Laboratory, a laboratory focusing on control and experimentation with walking robots and exoskeletons, design of high performance ground systems, and algorithms for active sensing in human environments. He is also a founding member of the UT Robotics Portfolio Program and the UT Robotics Center of Excellence. He was the UT Austin's Lead for DARPA's Robotics Challenge with NASA Johnson Space Center where he helped to design and test the Valkyrie humanoid robot. His research has been funded by NASA, the Office of Naval Research, Army Futures Command, NSF, DARPA, and private companies.

He has been awarded the NASA Elite Team Award for his contributions to NASA’s Johnson Space Center Software Robotics and Simulation Division. He is also a founding member and scientific advisor for Apptronik Systems, a company focusing on human-centered robotic products and R&D in human-augmentation exoskeletons and humanoids.

Pulkit Agrawal is an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research interests span robotics, deep learning, computer vision and reinforcement learning. Agrawal’s overarching goal is to build machines that can automatically and continuously learn about their environment to reach what humans consider common sense. Agrawal earned his BS from IIT Kanpur and was awarded the Director’s Gold Medal. He earned his PhD from UC Berkeley and co-founded SafelyYou Inc. His work has appeared in MIT Tech Review, Quanta and New Scientist. He is a recipient of Sony Faculty Research Award, Signatures Fellow Award, Fulbright Science and Technology Award, Goldman Sachs Global Leadership Award, OPJEMS and Sridhar Memorial Prize, among others. Agrawal holds the equivalent of a BA in Indian classical music and occasionally performs.

Serena Ivaldi is a tenured research scientist at Inria, leading the humanoid and human-robot interaction activities of the Team Larsen in Inria Nancy, France. She obtained her Ph.D. in Humanoid Technologies in 2011 at the Italian Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Inria, she was post-doctoral researcher in UPMC in Paris, France, then at the University of Darmstadt, Germany. She has been co-coordinator and PI of several collaborative projects, such as the EU projects CoDyCo (FP7) and AnDy (H2020), concerting the development of advanced anticipatory control and interaction skills for humanoid robots and exoskeletons. She has been developing whole-body tele-operation for the iCub humanoid robot and recently pioneered the use of exoskeletons in the ICU to physically assist physicians.

She was Program Chair of the conference IEEE/RAS Humanoids 2019. She is co-leader of the Humanoid Robotics Group of GDR Robotique (the French Robotics society). She was recently awarded the Suzanne Zivi Prize for excellence in research.