Meet the WiR V - Program

Anca Dragan, Ph.D.

Anca Dragan is an Assistant Professor in EECS at UC Berkeley, where she runs the InterACT lab. Her goal is to enable robots to work with, around, and in support of people. She works on algorithms that enable robots to a) coordinate with people in shared spaces, and b) learn what people want them to do. Anca did her PhD in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University on legible motion planning. At Berkeley, she helped found the Berkeley AI Research Lab, is a co-PI for the Center for Human-Compatible AI, and has been honored by the Sloan fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, the Okawa award, MIT's TR35, and an IJCAI Early Career Spotlight.

Marina Kollmitz, Ph.D. candidate

Marina Kollmitz did her undergrad in mechanical engineering at the university of Hanover and graduated with a Diploma Degree (Master's Degree equivalent) in 2015. During her undergrad she participated at RoboCup competitions with her university team in the RoboCup@work league. This is where her enthusiasm for robotics really took off. She loved working on her robot with the team - spending many long nights fixing last minute bugs and the atmosphere was always great at the competitions with the other teams. In 2014 she went to Bosch in Palo Alto to work on her diploma thesis. At Bosch, Marina worked on human-aware robot navigation, where she got interested in human-robot interaction. She first started considering doing her PhD during her master thesis, mostly because she was so impressed with the way her supervisor Kaijen Hsiao approached scientific problems and how well connected she was in the scientific world. In 2015, Marina started her PhD in Prof. Wolfram Burgard's lab at the University of Freiburg. She is working on human-robot interaction, where she is especially interested in physical human-robot interaction with force-sensitive mobile platforms and perception for robots in populated environments.

Yukie Nagai, Ph.D.

Yukie Nagai received the Ph.D. in Engineering from Osaka University in 2004. She was a Post-Doctoral Researcher with the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) from 2004 to 2006, and Bielefeld University from 2006 to 2009. She then became a Specially Appointed Associate Professor with Osaka University in 2009 and a Senior Researcher with NICT in 2017. Since April 2019, she is a Project Professor with the University of Tokyo.

Dr. Nagai has been investigating underlying neural mechanisms for social cognitive development by means of computational approach. She designs neural network models for robots to learn to acquire cognitive functions based on her theory of predictive learning. The simulator reproducing atypical perception in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) greatly impacts on the society as it enables people with and without ASD to better understand potential causes for social difficulties.

Erick Rovira, Ph.D.

Ericka Rovira, Ph. D. is a Full Professor of Engineering Psychology in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership at United States Military Academy, West Point, NY. Dr. Rovira is the Engineering Psychology Program and Lab Director. Her research investigates human autonomy interaction. Specifically, she investigates individual differences in cognition and how that impacts trust and reliance in autonomous systems e.g. robots. Dr. Rovira is a Fellow and Past President of the American Psychological Association’s Division 21: Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology Division. Dr. Rovira holds a Ph.D. in Applied Experimental Psychology from The Catholic University of America under the direction of Dr. Raja Parasuraman.

Irene Sardellitti, Ph.D.

Irene Sardellitti is a program officer in the Robotics and AI Unit at DG Connect, European Commission, since 2017. She’s an expert in European public funding, innovation strategies and technology management. She is passionate about facilitating industry – academic cooperation in the technological development through identification of innovation opportunities and support to its wide uptake.

She received a PhD in Robotics from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in 2008. During her PhD program, Irene was visiting student at the Stanford Robotics Lab. Next, she was Post–Doctoral Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology, from 2008 to 2013.

Agnieszka Wykowska , Ph.D.

Professor Agnieszka Wykowska leads the unit “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction” at the Italian Institute of Technology (Genoa, Italy), and is an adjunct professor of engineering psychology at the Luleå University of Technology. She studied neuro-cognitive psychology (Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich) and philosophy (Jagiellonian University, Krakow). She obtained PhD in psychology and the German “Habilitation” from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

Prof. Wykowska is an Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Social Robotics (Springer) and an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Psychology (section Cognition). She is a Guest (co-)Editor of a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B titled “From social brains to social robots: Applying neurocognitive insights to human-robot interaction (2018/2019), and of a research topic “Computational approaches for human-human and human-robot social interactions” (2018-2019) in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. She is a board member of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN). She regularly serves as committee member for various conferences, such as “International Conference on Social Robotics”, or “Human-Robot Interaction”.

Her interdisciplinary background resonates in the topic of her ERC grant “Intentional stance for social attunement” (awarded in 2016, https://instanceproject.eu). In her research, with the use of social and cognitive neuroscience methods, she examines how humans respond to humanoid robots, and how to make robots’ behaviour comprehensible for humans. Apart from contribution to social cognitive neuroscience, her research can inform the development of artificial intelligence for social robotics, and the design of robots for societal needs (healthcare, elderly care and daily assistance).