Program

Preliminary

The conference will be held from 14 to 18 April 2025. Authors will be able to present accepted papers and posters for three whole days from 15 to 17 April, and four half-day workshops will take place on April 14, 17 and 18.

 

Keynote of 15th April 2025

Francesco Nori (Director of Robotics at Google DeepMind)

Francesco was born in Padova, and he received his D.Eng. degree (highest honors) from the University of Padova (Italy) in 2002. During the year 2002 he was a member of the UCLA Vision Lab as a visiting student under the supervision of Prof. Stefano Soatto, University of California Los Angeles. During this collaboration period he started a research activity in the field of computational vision and human motion tracking. In 2003 Francesco Nori started his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Ruggero Frezza at the University of Padova, Italy. During this period the main topic of his research activity was modular control with special attention on biologically inspired control structures. Francesco Nori received his Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from the University of Padova (Italy) in 2005. In the year 2006 he moved to the University of Genova and started his PostDoc at the laboratory for integrated advanced robotics (LiraLab), beginning a fruitful collaboration with Prof. Giorgio Metta and Prof. Giulio Sandini. In 2007 Francesco Nori moved to the Italian Institute of technology where in 2015 he was appointed Tenure Track Researcher of the Dynamic and Interaction Control research line. His research interests are currently focused on whole-body motion control exploiting multiple (possibly compliant) contacts. With Giorgio Metta and Lorenzo Natale he is one of the key researchers involved in the iCub development, with specific focus on control and whole-body force regulation exploiting tactile information. Francesco is currently coordinating the H2020-EU project An.Dy (id. 731540); in the past he has been involved in two FP7-EU projects: CoDyCo as coordinator and Koroibot as principal investigator. In 2017 Francesco joined Deepmind where he collaborated with Raia Hadsell, Nando de Freitas, Martin Riedmiller and Dan Belov. His current interests seamlessly span robotics and artificial intelligence, with applications in both manipulation and locomotion. In 2023, Deepmind joined forces with Google Brain to form Google Deepmind; at present Francesco is director of robotics at Google Deepmind and his group of collaborators has significantly increased. Francesco currently leads the Google Deepmind robotics research effort with Nicolas Heess, Carolina Parada, Kanishka Rao, Razvan Surdulescu and Vincent Vanhoucke (senior director of robotics).

Keynote of 16th April 2025 

TBA

 

Keynote of 17th April 2025

Dr Samuele Vinanzi is a Senior Lecturer in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). He has obtained his BSc and MSc in Computer Engineering at the University of Palermo (Italy) and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Manchester (UK). He specializes in Cognitive Robotics, an interdisciplinary field that integrates robotics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and psychology to create intelligent robotic systems capable of human-like perception, reasoning and interaction with their environment. His focus is on enabling social collaboration between humans and robots, investigating topics such as emotional intelligence, artificial trust and intention reading. He has recently signed a contract with Oxford University Press to publish a book on trust relationships between humans and robots.

Conference’s Timing (provisional)

 

 The social dinner (included in the registration fee) will be organized in a suggestive location downtown Palermo or nearby, reachable by a suitable transfer. 

Special Tracks, Workshops and Forum links

[W1] Theory of Mind and Emotions in Human-Robot Interaction.

[W2] How do people explain the behaviour of robots? Epistemology of XAI and social robotics

[W3] Artificial Intelligence and its legal challenges. The European Union AI Act. 

[ST] Intelligent Inspection with Autonomous Robots in Confined and GPS-denied Environments: Challenges, Advances and Future Research

[IRF] Industrial Robotics Forum