VVV14 List of participants

This is a placeholder for a list of participants at the VVV14 summer school. Please add yourself before arriving at the school. For inspiration, see VVV13/VVV12/VVV11/VVV10/VVV09/VVV08/VVV07/VVV06).

 For editing use credentials that were sent to you by email (or ask the organizers).

There are sometimes edits lost with many people editing the same wiki page at once with the same username. Suggestion: add an empty section for yourself first, like this:

 == Your Name ==

Then save, and click the link to edit that specific section.

If you would like to, include in your profile a list of possible ideas for collaboration, see also the Task pages: Tasks.

Lorenzo Natale

I received MS degree in Electronic Engineering in 2000 and Ph.D. in Robotics in 2004 from the University of Genoa. I am researcher at IIT, in the iCub Facility, website. I was previously Postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and at the University of Genoa. I have been invited professor at the University of Genova for the courses artificial and intelligent systems and anthropomorphic robotics. I am interested in tactile and visual perception, and software engineering for robotics.

I am interested in the following tasks (see: Tasks):

• Task 3: Object Manipulation, grasping and exploration
• Task 4: Object recognition/detection.

Francesco Nori

  
  Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia 
  Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department
  my web page

Giorgio Metta

 

 Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT): giorgio.metta (at) iit.it, homepage

 I am senior scientist at the IIT and assistant professor at the University 
 of Genoa where I teach courses on anthropomorphic robotics and intelligent systems 
 for the bioengineering curricula. I hold a MS with honors (in 1994) and PhD (in 2000) 
 in electronic engineering both from the University of Genoa. From 2001 to 2002 I was
 postdoctoral associate at the MIT AI-Lab where I worked on various humanoid robotic 
 platforms. I am assistant professor at the University of Genoa since 2005 and with 
 IIT since 2006. My research activities are in the fields of biologically motivated 
 and humanoid robotics and in particular in developing life-long developing artificial 
 systems that show some of the abilities of natural systems.

 Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/giorgio.metta.9

Ugo Pattacini

  
  Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia 
  iCub Facility
  webpage

Vadim Tikhanoff

  
  Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia 
  iCub Facility
  webpage

I am interested in the following tasks (see: Tasks):

• Task 3: Object Manipulation, grasping and exploration. Tool use.
• Task 4: Object recognition/detection.

Marco Randazzo

  
  Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia 
  iCub Facility
  webpage

Matej Hoffmann

  
  Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia 
  iCub Facility
  webpage
 

I was born in Prague, Czech Republic. Between 2006 and 2013 I completed my PhD degree and then served as a research fellow at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Zurich, Switzerland (Prof. Rolf Pfeifer). As of May 2013, I'm a Postdoc at iCub Facility. I'm involved in the WYSIWYD project. My main research interest is embodied cognition. In particular, I am interested in the mechanisms underlying body representations and sensorimotor contingencies in humans and their implications for increasing the autonomy, resilience and robustness of robots. I'm passionate about the iCub exploiting its skin to learn about the extent of its body and acquire body awareness.

Lorenzo Jamone

  
  VIS Lab @ Instituto de Sitemas e Robotica
  Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon, Portugal
  webpage

I did my PhD in IIT from 2006 to 2010 (working with iCub ancestor, James), then visited Waseda University (Tokyo, Japan) from 2010 to 2012, where I was playing with this robot, and since 2013 I am at Instituto Superior Tecnico, in Lisbon, Portugal, where we do have a cute iCub. Main interests are humanoids and robot learning. A bit more specifically, during this summer school I will help the iCub to (autonomously) learn i) affordances of tools and objects and ii) a model of its own dynamics. I am also very interested in looking at what the guys involved in grasping and manipulation will do.

Evgenii Koriagin

Miguel Aragão

  

  VisLab, Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal

  My webpage

Mihai Gansari

• 

  mihai.gansari@acse.pub.ro

PhD Student in Systems Engineering at the Politehnica University of Bucharest, Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science, Laboratory of Natural Computing and Robotics (natuRO). My research is in SLAM and multi-robot systems. My interests are in mobile robotics, embedded systems, automatic control and AI.

Morteza Azad

I am a research fellow at the University of Birmingham and working on CoDyCo project. I just finished my Ph.D. at the Australian National University (ANU) under supervision of Dr. Roy Featherstone. I was working on balancing and hopping motions of under-actuated robots during my Ph.D. study.

Martina Zambelli

I am a Ph.D. student in the Personal Robotics Lab since January 2014. I received my Laurea degree in Automation Engineering from the University of Padova. My background is mainly concerned with automatic control, mathematical modeling and system identification, multi-agent systems and control of nonholonomic systems. My research interests involve robotics, control architectures for assistive robots, artificial cognitive systems, human-robot interaction, autonomous systems, nonlinear and distributed control.

Afonso Gonçalves

  
  VisLab, Instituto de Sistemas e Robótica, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal

Alessio Mauro Franchi

   
   AirLab @ Politecnico di Milano
   Milano, Italy (deib.polimi.it/)
   alessiomauro.franchi@polimi.it

   I received my master degree in computer science engineering last year from Politecnico di Milano; actually I am a first year PhD 
   student in Politecnico di Milano in the AirLab laboratory. My research theme concerns bioinspired cognitive robotics (learning, 
   reasoning, goal-generating architecture), but I am also interested in all aspects of robotics.

Joshua Pepneck

• 

I am going into my final year of my undergrad in computer science at the University of Lethbridge. I am also currently doing research focusing on EEG and it's applications, and am planning on incorporating robotics into this research in the future.

Giulia Pasquale

My name is Giulia Pasquale and I received the Bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2010 and the Master’s degree in Bioengineering in 2013 at the University of Genoa. At present I am a PhD student at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia – iCub Facilty and at the Università di Genova - DIBRIS department.

My research is focused on learning hierarchical representations of the visual signal, ad is aimed at the development of bioinspired artificial systems for visual recognition on the iCub humanoid robot.

At present I am working on object recognition in simple Human-Robot Interaction scenarios and the long term goal is to scale to higher level tasks such as scene exploration in dynamical environments.

Maxime Petit

Research Associate at Imperial College of London

I work on human-robot interaction and language development linked to action and body schema.

I am part of the WYSIWYD Project.

Jimmy Baraglia

• 
• 
• 

I am a student at the Osaka University. I study cognitive developmental robotics. I try to model the emergence of altruistic behaviors in robot inspired by infant development.

Cheers.

Daniele Pucci

I was born in Velletri, Rome, Italy, in 1985. I received the bachelor and master degrees in Control Engineering with highest honours and the academic excellence award from "Sapienza", University of Rome, in 2007 and 2009, respectively. In 2013 I received the PhD title in Information and Communication Technologies from University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, France, and in Control Engineering from “Sapienza” University of Rome, Italy. Since then, I am a post-doctoral fellow at the Italian Institute of Technology. My research interests include control of nonlinear systems and its applications to aerial vehicles and robotics.

Website: https://sites.google.com/site/danielepucci85/

Silvio Traversaro

I am a PhD student in the RBCS department of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia under the supervision of Francesco Nori.

My research interests are the applications of multibody dynamics to robotic control and estimation.

Takuji Yoshida

Master of Adaptive Machine Systems, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University. Japan. Bachelor thesis: 『Motion Experiment of Three Joint Hop Robot with Variable Interlocking Mechanism』 Master thesis: 『Modeling the development of goal-directed actions』,『Development of flexible tongue in Speaking Robot』

Zahra Gharaee

I received BS degree in Electrical Engineering (Control) in 2009 and MS in Mechatronics in 2012 from the K.N.Toosi University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. Now, I am PhD in Cognitive Science, at Lund University, Lund, Sweden.

I am interested in the following tasks (see: Tasks):

Luka Peternel

I am a PhD student at Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Personal website: [1]

Naveen Kuppuswamy

• 

Robotics Brain and Cognitive Sciences Dept., Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia Email : naveen.kuppuswamy ( at ) iit.it

I am a newly joined postdoc at the IIT RBCS, at the Cognitive Humanoids Lab. Prior to this, I hold a BE from Anna University, Chennai, MS from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejon, South Korea and PhD from the AI Lab, University of Zurich, Switzerland. My research interests in the context of this school are in whole body torque and impedance control with an interest in impedance estimation of unknown objects. In particular I will be closely working with Daniele_Pucci, Silvio Traversaro, Franesco_Nori, and Jorhabib Eljaik on these Tasks. Feel free to catch up with me to chat on impedance control, humanoid dynamics, muscle synergies and dimensionality reduction (my phd specialisation), good cuisine (Indian, Italian or otherwise), poorly implemented fitness routines, the joys of Italian bureaucracy, or anything else you can think of.

Grégoire Pointeau

Hi, I'm a PhD Student in Lyo at the INSERM - Robotic and Cogition Lab. I'm interrested in language and autobiographical memory. I'm part of the project WYSIWYD.

Anne-Laure MEALIER

I'm a PhD student from the Robot Cognition Laboratory of Peter Ford Dominey (Lyon, FRANCE). I work on the European project WYSIWYD on the interaction between language and actions.

anne.laure.mealier@gmail.com

Kira Mourão

I'm a postdoc at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, working on the EU Xperience project. My work on Xperience focuses on learning representations of actions which can be used by automated planners. The actions are learnt from simulated or robot data, generated by a robot exploring the world and recording its observations and actions. Traditional approaches to this problem have limited ability to handle data from noisy, incomplete or non-deterministic environments, and never all of these: the approach I have developed works in all of these scenarios. I'm interested in working with the iCub to generate real robot data on which to apply my method.

This work is an extension of my PhD (also at Edinburgh) in Neuroinformatics, and my wider background is in maths, computer science and operations research. In a previous life I worked as a software developer and tech lead in a variety of software development roles.

About my name: Kira is Russian and Mourão is Portuguese. I'm neither (100% Scottish).

my webpage

Christos Melidis

I was born in 1990 in Thessaloniki. I graduated in Computer Science at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. My work includes projects from various aspects of Computer Science (Robotics, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Grid computing, Computational Modeling, Database Management Systems and Web Development). My research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Robotics and Machine Learning. I am in my first year in my PhD, working on an interface for remote control of robots, in Plymouth University, UK.

my webpage

Jorhabib Eljaik

Ph.D. candidate at the Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences department (RBCS) from the Italian Institute of Technology. Currently working on whole body control for the iCub platform.

Chiara Bartolozzi

I'm Researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology. I earned a degree in Engineering at University of Genova (Italy) and a Ph.D. in Neuroinformatics at ETH Zurich, developing analog subthreshold circuits for emulating biophysical neuronal properties onto silicon and modelling selective attention on hierarchical multi-chip systems. I'm currently leading the Neuromorphic Systems and Interfaces group, mainly working on the application of the "neuromorphic" engineering approach to the design of sensors for robotic platforms.

Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia

iCub Facility

webpage

Raffaello Camoriano

File:Raffaello

Fellow PhD @IIT-UNIGE

raffaello.camoriano@iit.it

IIT: http://www.iit.it/en/people/raffaello-camoriano.html

LCSL: http://lcsl.mit.edu/#/people

Li: it.linkedin.com/in/raffaellocamoriano/

PhD Research Theme: Machine Learning for Perception and Classification in Robotics

I obtained the Master's Degree in Robotics Engineering with top grade at the University of Genova, Italy, in October 2013, and the Bachelor's Degree with honors in Computer Engineering in the same University in September 2011. I also completed the ISICT-ISSUGE excellence program for the BSc and the MSc, as a student with scholarship.

Other interests: A.I., Statistics, Control Theory, Mechanical Analysis (Screw Theory)