Prof. Giorgio METTA
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Genova, Italy

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Bio
Prof. Giorgio Metta is Vice Scientific Director at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) and Director of the iCub Facility Department at the same institute. He coordinates the development of the iCub robotic project. He holds an MSc cum laude (1994) and PhD (2000) in electronic engineering both from the University of Genoa. From 2001 to 2002, he was postdoctoral associate at the MIT AI-Lab. He was previously with the University of Genoa and since 2012 Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the University of Plymouth (UK). He is also deputy director of IIT delegate to the training of young researchers. He is member of the board of directors of euRobotics aisbl, the European reference organization for robotics research. Giorgio Metta research activities are in the fields of biologically motivated and humanoid robotics and, in particular, in developing humanoid robots that can adapt and learn from experience. Giorgio Metta is author of more than 250 scientific publications. He has been working as principal investigator and research scientist in about a dozen international as well as national funded projects.

Prof. Mark YIM
University of Pennsylvania, USA

Bio
Prof. Mark Yim received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering in 1994 from Stanford University. Mark's research interests began with modular robots made up of identical active components that can be arranged to form many different configurations, ranging from a snake robot to a humanoid to a 17-legged centipede. These systems can also self-reconfigure, changing the robot's shape to suit the task. In addition to self-reconfiguring and self-assembling robots, Mark has also started work on flying robots, and task specification, working to figure out how to specify a task so that a robot configuration can optimally satisfy that task.

Prof. Sarah COSENTINO
Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

Bio
Sarah is a hands-on engineer and enthusiastic academic researcher. She started working as a freelance collaborator in an Electronics company during high-school, until earning her M.Sc. in Electronic engineering at Politecnico di Milano. Straight after her graduation she moved to Japan where after 3 years working for challenging projects in Electronics R&D, she enrolled in a Ph.D. course in Robotics in one of the top Japanese Universities, Waseda University. As an academic researcher she now collaborates with several other researchers across the globe, supervising interns and spending months in leading universities in U.S. and Europe. Her main interests are human physiology, human sensing, human communication, affective computing and human-robot interaction. She has hands-on experience in electronic design and assembly, and a wide researching experience in developing sensor systems for applications mostly related to human sensing and human-robot interaction, authoring several publications on her specific work.

Prof. Fabio BONSIGNORIO
Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy.

Bio
Fabio Bonsignorio is currently a Professor at the Biorobotics Institute of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa. He has been professor in the Department of System Engineering and Automation of the University Carlos III of Madrid until 2014. In 2009 he was awarded the Santander Chair of Excellence in Robotics at the same university. He is founder and CEO of Heron Robots (advanced robotic solutions), see www.heronrobots.com. He has been working in the R&D departments of several major Italian and American companies for more than 20 years. He is a Founding Director of euRobotics aisbl, the private part of SPARC, the Eu Robotics PPP. He is currently a member of the Research Board of Directors of SPARC. His preferred research topics are in advanced robotics: cognition, control, modeling, software architectures, epistemological issues in robotics, performance evaluation and foundational issues like ’morphological computation’. He has pioneered and introduced the topic of Reproducible Research and Benchmarking in Robotics and AI, where is one of the leading experts.

Prof. Robin MURPHY
Texas A&M University, Texas, USA

Bio
Robin Roberson Murphy (IEEE Fellow) received a B.M.E. in mechanical engineering, a M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science in 1980, 1989, and 1992, respectively, from Georgia Tech, where she was a Rockwell International Doctoral Fellow. She is the Raytheon Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M and directs the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue and an IEEE Fellow. Her research interests are artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and heterogeneous teams of robots and she has over 100 publications including the best selling textbook, Introduction to AI Robotics (MIT Press 2000). She is a founder of the fields of rescue robots and human-robot interaction. In 2008, she was awarded the Al Aube Outstanding Contributor award by the AUVSI Foundation, for her insertion of ground, air, and sea robots for urban search and rescue (US&R) at 11 disasters, including the 9/11 World Trade Center disaster, Hurricanes Katrina and Charley, and the Crandall Canyon Utah mine collapse. Since arriving at Texas A&M in 2008, she has been leading an initiative in emergency informatics, which stems in part from witnessing valuable data from robots not reaching the right decision maker. Dr. Murphy is active in the community, having served on the IEEE Robotics and Automation executive committees, numerous National Academies and defense boards, including the Defense Science Board.

Mr. Francesco FERRO
PAL Robotics CEO and co-founder, Barcelona, Spain.

Bio
Francesco Ferro is the CEO and co-founder of PAL Robotics, one of the top service robotics companies around the world, and a euRobotics aisbl Board Director. He received a BSc and MSc degree in Telecommunications Engineering in 2002 at the Politecnico di Torino (Italy), a Master at ISEN in Lille (France) and an xecutive MBA at the University of Barcelona (Spain) in 2011. Since 2004 he is developing cutting-edge humanoid service robots at PAL Robotics. This robotics company based in Barcelona has the mission of making people’s life easier by using robotics. For more than 14 years the team has developed robots for service tasks and Industry 4.0, as well as for R&D. TALOS is their latest creation, standing as one of the most advanced and powerful biped humanoids for industry demands. TALOS joined the PAL Robotics’ family in 2017, also composed by TIAGo, a collaborative robot for Industry 4.0 systems; the TIAGo Base for courier applications and logistics; and StockBot, the robot that automates inventory in retail stores; amongst other cutting-edge humanoid platforms such as REEM-C for R&D purposes and REEM as a service provider in dynamic environments.

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