Speakers

LECTURERS

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  Lorenzo Jamone

  University College London (UCL), UK, Computer Science Department

  Lorenzo Jamone is an Associate Professor in Robotics & AI at the Department of Computer Science of University College London (UCL), where he leads th...e CRISP group: Cognitive Robotics and Intelligent Systems for the People. He received the MS degree (honors) in computer engineering from the University of Genoa (2006), and the PhD degree in humanoid technologies from the University of Genoa and the Italian Institute of Technology (2010), in Genoa (Italy). He was Associate Researcher at the Takanishi Laboratory of Waseda University (2010-2012), in Tokyo (Japan), and at the Computer and Robot Vision Laboratory of the Instituto Superior Técnico (2012-2016), in Lisbon (Portugal). He was a Lecturer (2016-2020) and then a Senior Lecturer (2020-2024) in Robotics at the Queen Mary University of London (UK), where he initially funded the CRISP group and he worked within ARQ (Advanced Robotics at Queen Mary). He has over 140 publications with an H-index of 31. His current research interests include cognitive robotics, robot learning, robotic manipulation, tactile sensing.

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  Danica Kragic (Online)

  Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Sweden

  Danica Kragic is a Professor at the School of Computer Science and Communication at the Royal Institute of Technology, KTH. She received MSc in Mechan...ical Engineering from the Technical University of Rijeka, Croatia in 1995 and PhD in Computer Science from KTH in 2001. She has been a visiting researcher at Columbia University, Johns Hopkins University and INRIA Rennes. She is the Director of the Centre for Autonomous Systems. Danica received the 2007 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award. She is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and Founding member of Young Academy of Sweden. She holds a Honorary Doctorate from the Lappeenranta University of Technology and Technical Univeristy of Rijeka. Her research is in the area of robotics, computer vision and machine learning.

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  Heather Culbertson

  University of Southern California

  Heather Culbertson is a Gabilan Assistant Professor and Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, and Biomedical ...Engineering at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses on the design and control of haptic devices and rendering systems, human-robot interaction, and virtual reality. Particularly she is interested in creating haptic interactions that are natural and realistically mimic the touch sensations experienced during interactions with the physical world. Previously, she was a research scientist in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University. She received her PhD in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015. She is currently serving as General Co-Chair for IEEE Haptics Symposium. Her awards include the NSF CAREER Award, IEEE Technical Committee on Haptics Early Career Award, MassRobotics Rising Star in Robotics Award, and Ershaghi Faculty Mentorship Award.

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  Cecilia Laschi

  National University of Singapore

  Cecilia Laschi is Provost's Chair Professor of robotics at the National University of Singapore, leading the Soft Robotics Lab. She is Director of the...Advanced Robotics Centre (ARC) of NUS and Co-Director of CARTIN - Centre for Advanced Robotics Technology and Innovation, funded by NRF. She is on leave from Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Italy, The BioRobotics Institute (Dept. of Excellence in Robotics & AI). She graduated in Computer Science at the University of Pisa and received a Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of Genoa. She received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, in 2023. She was JSPS visiting researcher at the Humanoid Robotics Institute of Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. Cecilia Laschi is best-known for her research in soft robotics, an area that she pioneered and contributed to develop at international level. She investigates fundamental challenges for building robots with soft materials, with a bioinspired approach which started with a study of the octopus as a model for robotics.

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  Luis Martí

  Inria Chile

  Ph.D. in Applied Artificial Intelligence. Current Scientific Director at Inria Chile, the Chilean center of Inria, the French National Institute for C...omputational Sciences. Prior to his current role, he was a senior researcher of the TAU team at Inria Saclay since 2015, an adjunct professor (tenured) at the Institute of Computer Science of the Fluminense Federal University, and a member of the CNPq Young Talent of Science Fellow at the Applied Robotics and Intelligence Lab in the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

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  Xavier Hinaut

  Inria (Mnemosyne team) & Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases, Bordeaux France

  Xavier Hinaut is a Research Scientist in Bio-inspired Machine Learning and Computational Neuroscience at the Inria Center of the University of Bordeau...x, France, since 2016. He received an MSc and Engineering degree from Compiègne Technology University (UTC), FR in 2008, an MSc in Cognitive Science & AI from EPHE, FR in 2019, and then his PhD from Lyon University, FR in 2013. In 2022, he obtained his Habilitation entitled Reservoir SMILES: Sensori-motor Interaction, Language and Embodiment of Symbols. He is currently co-chair of the IEEE CIS Task Force on Reservoir Computing and past chair of the TCDS Language Learning task force. His work is at the frontier of neurosciences, machine learning, robotics, and linguistics: ranging from modeling human sentence processing to analyzing birdsongs and their neural correlates. He both uses reservoirs for machine learning (e.g., birdsong classification) and models (e.g., sensorimotor models of how birds learn to sing). He manages the “DeepPool” ANR project on human sentence modeling with Deep Reservoirs architectures and the Inria Exploratory Action “BrainGPT” on Reservoir Transformers. He is also involved in other multi-lab projects such as the LLM4Code Inria initiative. He leads ReservoirPy development: the most up-to-date Python library for Reservoir Computing. https://github.com/reservoirpy/reservoirpy

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TENTATIVES

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  Álvaro Soto

  Department of Computer Science at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

  Álvaro Soto holds a civil engineering degree from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, a Master of Science degree from Louisiana State Univers...ity, and a Doctor of Philosophy and PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. His areas of expertise include machine learning, cognitive robotics, visual recognition, and big data. He is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at UC Chile and co-founder of the startup Zippedi, a Chilean robot that uses artificial intelligence for supermarkets and retail. He currently directs the National Center for Artificial Intelligence.

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