Innovation Talk. Human Robots.

Jun 01 2016 - ore 18.00 - Bologna Business School - Villa Guastavillani, Via degli Scalini 18 - Bologna

Giorgio Metta, Director iCub humanoid robot project Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, will be the last protagonist of the spring edition of the Innovation Talks and Luca De Biase, Editor Nova24, will attend as discussant.

Some information about the speaker and the discussant.

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.

He is principal investigator on RobotCub is a 5 years long project funded by the European Commission through Unit E5 Cognitive Systems, Interaction & Robotics. The main goal is to study cognition through the implementation of a humanoid robot the size of a 3.5 year old child: the iCub. This is an open project in many different ways: we distribute the platform openly, we develop software open-source, and we are open to including new partners and form collaboration worldwide.

The ITALK project aims to develop artificial embodied agents able to acquire complex behavioural, cognitive, and linguistic skills through individual and social learning. This will be achieved through experiments with the iCub humanoid robot to learn to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions.

The CHRIS project will address the fundamental issues which would enable safe Human Robot Interaction (HRI). Specifically this project addresses the problem of a human and a robot performing co-operative tasks in a co-located space, such as in the kitchen where your service robot stirs the soup as you add the cream. These issues include communication of a shared goal (verbally and through gesture), perception and understanding of intention (from dextrous and gross movements), cognition necessary for interaction, and active and passive compliance.

Luca De Biase is the innovation editor at Sole 24 Ore newspaper and the Nova 24, the tech section for the same journal; and editor at Vita Nova, a tablet magazine. Additionally, De Biase is a professor at the Master in Science Communications at the University of Padova, a member at the Scientific Committee of the Master in Science Communication at the Sissa School in Trieste; and a member at the Scientific Committee of the Master in Big Data Analytics at the Luiss University at Rome. 

Prof. De Biase has been a guest speaker several times at the OECD in Paris, StsForum in Kyoto, at the Mit-MediaLab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the Atomium Culture in Bruxelles, and many more.

 

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