Prof. Angelo Cangelosi

The University of Manchester, UK

Organisation Chair

About:

Angelo Cangelosi is Professor of Machine Learning and Robotics at the University of Manchester (UK). He also is Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Previously Angelo was Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Cognition, and founding director, at the Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems at Plymouth University (UK). Cangelosi studied psychology and cognitive science at the Universities of Rome La Sapienza and at the University of Genoa, and was visiting scholar at the University of California San Diego and the University of Southampton. Cangelosi's main research expertise is on language grounding and embodiment in humanoid robots, developmental robotics, human-robot interaction, and on the application of neuromorphic systems for robot learning. He currently is the coordinator of the EU H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Industrial Doctorate “APRIL Applications of Personal Robotics through Interaction and Learning” (2016-2019). He also is Principal investigator for the ongoing projects “THRIVE++” (US Air Force Office of Science and Research, 2014-1023), the H2020 project MoveCare, and the Marie Curie projects SECURE, DCOMM and STRoNA. He has been coordinator of the FP7 projects ITALK and RobotDoc ITN, as well as UK projects BABEL and VALUE. Overall, he has secured over £30m of research grants as coordinator/PI. Cangelosi has produced more than 250 scientific publications, and has been general/bridging chair of numerous workshops and conferences including the IEEE ICDL-EpiRob Conferences (Frankfurt 2011, Osaka 2013, Lisbon 2017, Tokyo 2018). In 2012-13 he was Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Autonomous Mental Development. He has been Visiting Professor at Waseda University (Japan) and at Sassari and Messina Universities (Italy). Cangelosi is Editor (with K. Dautenhahn) of the journal Interaction Studies, and in 2015 was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Development. His latest book “Developmental Robotics From Babies to Robots” (MIT Press; co-authored with Matt Schlesinger) was published in January 2015, and recently translated in Chinese and Japanese.

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Prof. Alessandro Di Nuovo

Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Organisation Chair

About:

Prof. Alessandro Di Nuovo is Professor of Machine Intelligence at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the leader of technological and digital innovations for independent lives for the Advanced Well-being Research Institute. He is with the Department of Computing, where is leading the Smart Interactive Technologies (SIT) Research Laboratory, which is conducting internationally renowned research in interdisciplinary applications of machine intelligence, including healthcare and well-being.In the last 3 years, ADN has been awarded as PI £1M for research project in fundamental and applied topics in AI and Robotics, funded by public (EU H2020, EPSRC), private (IBM, NVIDIA) and charities (Sheffield Children Hospital).His research specialises in computational intelligence and its application to cognitive modelling, human-robot interaction, computer-aided assessment of intellectual disabilities, and embedded computer systems.

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Prof. Silvia Rossi

University of Naples Federico II, Italy

Organisation Chair

About:

Silvia Rossi is currently Associate Professor at Dipartimento di Ingegneria Elettrica e Tecnologie dell'Informazione - DIETI, University of Naples "Federico II", Italy. Co-chief manager of the PRISCA (Intelligent Robotics and Advanced Cognitive System Projects) lab. She is coordinator and principal investigator of the National Project UPA4SAR "User-centred Profiling and Adaptation for Socially Assistive Robotics". She received the M.Sc. degree in Physics from 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. During her career, she was research assistant at the Division on Cognitive and Communication Technologies - ITC-irst (Italy), at the institute of Cybernetics E. Caianiello - CNR (Italy), and visiting researcher at the Center for Human-Computer Communication - Oregon Health and Science University, Oregon (USA).Her research interests include Multi-agent Systems, Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Architectures and Behavior-based Robotics and User Profiling and Recommender Systems.

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Prof. Pedro Guijarro Fuentes

University of Balearic Islands, Spain

Organisation Chair

About:

Since 2013, Dr. Pedro Guijarro Fuentes has been an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish Philology, Modern and Classic at the University of the Balearic Islands. He got his BA (Honours) in Spanish Philology from the University of Granada in 1991 and later his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Salford (UK) in 1999. He has a long track record of providing teaching on the teaching of the Spanish language in several European universities including the University of Utrecht (Netherlands) (1992-1995), University of Salford (UK) (1995-1998) and the University of Plymouth (UK) (1998 to 2013). His main research interests revolve around the interdisciplinary field of Applied Spanish Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics and Bilingualism. His current main research projects include the study of spatial prepositions, direct object marking, word order and tense/aspect by a variety of Spanish learners in different learning contexts. These projects are funded by a variety of institutions such as the British Academy (United Kingdom), Art and Humanities Research Council (UK), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (Germany). More recent funding has been provided by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Spain) and the European Commission within the Horizon 2020 research program. He has authored and co-authored numerous articles, book chapters and books, all published by various international publishers among which are John Benjamins, de Gruyter. His research has also been presented at different international forums with more than 100 papers many of them by invitation, and published in journals such as Language Learning, Bilingualism- Language and Cognition, Cognition, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, Applied Psycholinguistics, First Language, and Applied Linguistic Review, among others. He has also organized many professional meetings among which is the recently held Romance Turn 2014 Conference held at the at the Universitat de les Illes Balears.

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Rahul Singh Maharjan

University of Manchester, UK

Local Organisation Committee

About:

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Mehdi Hellou

University of Manchester, UK

Local Organisation Committee

About:

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Prof. Filippo Cavallo

Topic: Internet of Robotics Things technologies for active and healthy aging: scenarios and challenge

About:

Prof. Filippo Cavallo (M.Sc. degree in EE and the Ph.D. degree in bioengineering) is Associate Professor of Biomedical Robotics with the Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Florence, Italy. The objectives of his research activities are to promote and evaluate novel service robotics for active and healthy ageing, and to identify and validate disruptive healthcare paradigms for neurodegenerative and chronic diseases, focusing on prevention and support for physical and cognitive declines. The main scientific and technological challenges concern social robotics, human robot interaction, wearable sensors, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence for robot companion and healthcare applications. He has participated in various national and European projects and is the author of various papers on conferences and ISI journals.

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Prof. Michael Beetz

Topic: Robots and the Web

About:

Prof. Michael Beetz is a professor for Computer Science at the Faculty for Mathematics & Informatics of the University Bremen and head of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI). IAI investigates AI-based control methods for robotic agents, with a focus on human-scale everyday manipulation tasks. With his openEASE, a web-based knowledge service providing robot and human activity data, Michael Beetz aims at improving interoperability in robotics and lowering the barriers for robot programming. Due to this the IAI group provides most of its results as open-source software, primarily in the ROS software library. Michael Beetz received his diploma degree in Computer Science with distinction from the University of Kaiserslautern. His MSc, MPhil, and PhD degrees were awarded by Yale University in 1993, 1994, and 1996 and his Venia Legendi from the University of Bonn in 2000. Michael Beetz was a member of the steering committee of the European network of excellence in AI planning (PLANET) and coordinating the research area “robot planning”. He is associate editor of the AI Journal and the coordinator of the German collaborative research centre EASE (Everyday Activity Science and Engineering, since 2017). His research interests include plan-based control of robotic agents, knowledge processing and representation for robots, integrated robot learning, and cognitive perception. In 2019, he received a honorary degree from the University of Örebro for his longstanding cooperation and exceptional, international research.

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Prof. Lucas Cordeiro

Topic: Security of Software Systems with Applications on the Internet of Things

About:

Prof. Lucas C. Cordeiro is a Reader in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester (UoM), where he leads the Systems and Software Security (S3) Research Group. Dr. Cordeiro is the Arm Centre of Excellence Director at UoM; he also leads the Trusted Digital Systems Cluster at the Centre for Digital Trust and Society. Dr. Cordeiro is also affiliated with the Formal Methods Group at UoM and the Post-Graduate Programs in Electrical Engineering and Informatics at the Federal University of Amazonas. Before joining the University of Manchester, he worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford and as a research engineer at Diffblue. In addition, Dr. Cordeiro worked for five years as a software engineer at Siemens / BenQ Mobile and CTPIM / NXP semiconductors. His work focuses on software model checking, automated testing, program synthesis, software security, embedded and cyber-physical systems. He has co-authored more than 120 peer-reviewed publications in the most prestigious venues (e.g., ICSE, CAV, TACAS, FSE, ASE, ISSTA, TSE, TR, TC). He has received various international awards, including the Distinguished Paper Award at ACM ICSE’11, and 28 awards from the international competitions on software verification (SV-COMP) and testing (Test-Comp) 2012-2021. He has a proven track record of securing research funding from EPSRC, Intel, Samsung, Nokia Institute of Technology, CNPq, FAPEAM, British Council, and Royal Society (career total over USD11,572,092).

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Dr. Ben Kehoe

Topic: Serverless cloud architecture and cloud robotics

About:

Dr. Ben Kehoe works in the field of Cloud Robotics—using the internet to enable robots to do more and better things—an area of IoT involving computation in the cloud and at the edge, Big Data, and machine learning. Approaching cloud computing from this angle, Ben focuses on developing business value rapidly through serverless (and servicefull) applications. At iRobot, Ben guided the transition to a serverless architecture on AWS based on AWS Lambda and AWS IoT to support iRobot’s connected robot fleet. This architecture enables iRobot to focus on its core mission of building amazing robots with a minimum of development and operations effort. Ben seeks to amplify voices from dev, operations, and security to help the community shape the evolution of serverless and event-driven designs for IoT and cloud computing more broadly.

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Prof. Praminda Caleb-Solly

Topic: Rethinking Assistive Robotics

About:

Praminda Caleb-Solly is Professor of Embodied Intelligence at the University of Nottingham where she leads the Cyber-physical Health and Assistive Robotics Technologies research group. Prior to joining Nottingham, she led research in Assistive Robotics at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory.

She holds degrees in Electronic Systems Engineering, Biomedical Instrumentation Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Interactive Evolutionary Computation. From 2014 to 2018 she was the Head of Electronics and Computer Systems at Designability, an assistive technology SME and charity. Prof Caleb-Solly's recent portfolio of Innovate UK, EPSRC, AHRC and EC funded research includes designing and evaluating socially and physically assistive robotics and Internet of Things sensor-based intelligent solutions. She is also currently leading an UK EPSRC Healthcare Technologies Network+ programme, EMERGENCE: Tackling Frailty - Facilitating the Emergence of Healthcare Robots from Labs into Service.

She co-authored the UK-Robotics and Autonomous Systems White Paper on Robotics in Social Care: A Connected Care EcoSystem for Independent Living; and gave evidence to the UK House of Lords’ Science and Technology Committee inquiry into Ageing: Science, Technology and Healthy Living. She serves as a member of the British Standards Institute’s Technical Committee on Service Robot Safety and Ethics. In 2020 she co-founded Robotics for Good CIC, a 'robotics as a service' start-up supporting the deployment of telepresence robots in different application domains.

CHART research group: here

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Prof. Gabriel Oliver

Topic: A Platform for Long-lasting Observation of Marine Ecosystems

About:

Prof. Gabriel Oliver is Full Professor in Computer Architecture at the UIB where he is the director of the Systems, Robotics and Vision Group. Since 1987 he has participated in more than 25 R&D funded research projects and contracts, leading more than 20 of them. He has authored more than 125 research publications in computer vision and mobile robotics, and supervised 5 PhD theses (+2 in progress). His current research interests comprise Mobile robot visual guidance; 3D vision, laser and sonar-based motion estimation, localization and mapping. He has taught courses on analog and digital electronics, microcomputer systems, automatic control, industrial and mobile robotics computer vision, perception systems, among others.

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Prof. Tony Prescott

Topic: Designing Social Robots that People Can Relate To

About:

Prof. Tony Prescott is a Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the University of Sheffield and Director of Sheffield Robotics an inter-disciplinary research institute across both Universities in Sheffield. He maintains profiles on ResearchGate and Linkedin, and a Youtube Channel with links to online interviews, talks and movies about our robots and research. In addition to his output, He has authored a number of shorter pieces of general interest, about artificial intelligence and robotics, for the online magazine The Conversation.

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Prof. Irene Lopatovska

Topic: Costs and benefits of personalizing conversational agents

About:

Prof. Irene Lopatovska is an Associate Professor at the School of Information at Pratt Institute in New York, NY. Dr. Lopatovska graduated from Rutgers University with a Ph.D. in Information Science. Her research interests include the role of emotion in information interaction contexts; human information behavior; and research methods.

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Dr. Ioanna Giorgi

Topic: Multilingual cognition of social robot

About:

Ioanna Giorgi received her PhD Degree in Computer Science at the University of Manchester, Manchester, U.K., in 2022. She specialises in brain-inspired architectures to explore the role of human language in high-level cognitive modelling in robotics. Her research interests include, human-language-facilitated neurorobotics, robot multilingual cognition social robotics, and human-robot interaction (HRI). Dr Giorgi joined the University of Plymouth as a Research Fellow in Computational Intelligence (CI) and Robotics in 2021 as part of the EU Interreg 2 Seas Mers Zeeën “AGE Independently” (AGE’IN) Project. She is also Visiting Research Fellow in CI and Robotics at the University of Kent, U.K., since November 2021.

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Prof. Elisa Rubegni

Topic: Facing AI socio-technical challenges in vulnerable groups

About:

Prof. Elisa Rubegni research lies within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). She explores the socio-technical issues emerging from the use of interactive technology with the aim of understanding the complex interplay of artefacts, human mind, body, and environment. To meet this complexity, her approach combines psychology theories, social science methods and design practice, concretized in developing digital artefacts. Her research is grounded on cultural psychology, and she investigate these issues by recognizing that a successful system can only be developed by fully understanding the fundamental role played by social interactions in the development of cognition, and in the process of "meaning making". Indeed, her research relies on an ecological approach valuing participatory design methods, qualitative and ethnographically informed investigations. She has explored these issues in a broad range of application areas and technologies (e.g. embedded and distributed systems in museums, tangible and gesture user interface in public spaces, large pervasive displays for communities and mobile technology for learning).

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Prof. Clare Dixon

Topic: Verification for Autonomous Robot Systems: What, Why, How?

About:

Prof. Clare Dixon is a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. She leads the Autonomy and Verification research group. Prior to joining Manchester she was a Professor of Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool, working as an academic at Liverpool from 2001-2020. She was a Senior Research Fellow and Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Computing and Mathematics at Manchester Metropolitan University 1995-2000.

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