RobotDoc - Robotics for Development of Cognition

Alessandro Cristiano (ESR), Zurich University, Switzerland

Cristiano received a Bachelor (BSc) and a Master of Science (MSc) degree in computer engineering respectively from the University of Catania and the Politecnico di Milano (Italy); the latter specialising in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. He is interested in biologically inspired control of humanoid robots, particularly in motor skill learning exploring the neuroscientific concepts of muscle synergy and muscle grouping.

Handl Andrea (ESR), Uppsala University, Sweden

Andrea studied Psychology at the University of Leipzig (Germany), and obtained her Master of Science (MSc) degree in Psychological Research Methods at the University of London (United Kingdom). Specializing in developmental psychology, she is particularly interested in how, when and what infants learn about other people's communicatory actions.

Kuppuswamy Naveen (ESR), Zurich University, Switzerland

Naveen graduated with a Bachelor of Engineering from the Anna University, Chennai (India) and a Masters in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon (South Korea). He works on adaptive sensorimotor control for biologically inspired robots with a special interest on mutual adaptation of model learning and adaptive control.

Narayan Vikram (ESR), Bielefeld University, Germany

Vikram received his Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science from University of Mysore, Mysore, India. He works on fusing top-down and bottom-up cues for attention in social interaction. He has ten peer reviewed publications in the domain of computer vision to his credit, and serves as a reviewer for major computer vision conferences.

Ruciński Marek (ESR), Plymouth University, UK

Marek obtained his BSc degree in Computing Science in 2005 followed by a MSc degree in the same field in 2007 (specialising in Intelligent Decision Support Systems), both at Poznań University of Technology (Poland). Following his graduation, Marek underwent one-year traineeship in European Space Agency's Advanced Concepts Team (the Netherlands), where he was working on space applications of Artificial Intelligence. Currently Marek endavours to gain better understanding of the mechanisms behind human mathematical thought with the use of robotic modelling.

Francesca Stramandinoli (ESR), Plymouth University, UK

Francesca has a BEng in Computer Science Engineering and a MEng in Automation Engineering from the University of Calabria (Italy). She worked as External Expert at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Calabria, where she dealt with the design of CNN-based algorithms for medical images segmentation and the numerical integration of nonlinear partial differential equations. Currently, she is working on the grounding of abstract words within the Plymouth THINK&TALK node.

Wilkinson Nick (ESR), IIT, Genoa

Nick received a BSc in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence in 2005 and MSc in Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems from Sussex University, UK in 2008. He is now researching how robots can make use of motoric and contextual information in scene analysis.

Znajdek Joanna (ESR), Bielefeld University, Germany

Joanna has received M.A. degree in psychology from the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (Poland) in 2010 and started her Ph.D. studies in the same year at the Cognitive Interaction Technology Center of Excellence in Bielefeld (Germany). She is doing research on the mechanism of language development in infants.

Bentley Barry, Plymouth University, UK

Barry is currently reading Computer Science at the University of Plymouth (United Kingdom), where he is collaborating with Martin Peniak and the European Space Agency, investigating the application of evolutionary concepts to the design of autonomous planetary rovers. From September 2011 he will be a PhD studnet at the University of Cambridge.

Chuang Julie Li-Wen, NTUST, Taiwan

Julie is a PhD students at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. She works on cognitive robotics.

Dermitzakis Konstantinos, Zurich University, Switzerland

Konstantinos Dermitzakis received his BSc in Computer Science and MSc in AI from the University of Edinburgh and is currently a PhD candidate at the AI Lab, UZH. His research interests are in prosthetics, bionics, sensorimotor control, machine learning and neurosciences in general.

Ferrauto Tomassino, ISTC National Research Council, Italy

Tomassino has a Laurea/MEng in computer engineering and automation from the University of L'Aquila (Italy). He is a PhD student at the University of Plymouth and is now working at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome on language and action compositionality within the ITALK project.

Lee Kyuhwa, Imperial College London, UK

Kyuhwa studied on computer vision and machine learning at Georgia Institute of Technology where he obtained his Master of Science degree in Computer Science. He is currently pursuing a PhD degree at Imperial College London focusing on the problem of “what to imitate” with various attentional mechanisms to enhance the quality of interactions between humans and robots.

Paraense, Andre Luis University of Campinas, Brazil

André Luis studied Computer Engineering at the University of Campinas (Brazil), and obtained his Master of Science (MSc) degree in the same field at the University of Campinas in 2008, specializing in Cognitive Decision Support Systems. He is currently doing his PhD at the University of Campinas, working with the Cogsys Group on cognition and consciousness, particularly aimed at conceiving and implementing a computational cognitive architecture to be applied to artificial creatures.

Pierris Georgios, University of Wales Newport, UK

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Georgios holds a degree in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Technical University of Crete, Greece. He is currently developing hierarchical cognitive models for tactile gesture learning, and reproduction on humanoid robots in University of Wales, Newport within the ROBOSKIN project.

Read Robin, Plymouth University, UK

Robin obtained a BSc in Design Engineering in 2008 (Middlesex University), an MSc in Robotics in 2009 (University of Plymouth), and is now undertaking a PhD in Human-Robot Interaction as part of the ALIZ-E Project. He is investigating non-linguistic interaction through both the utterance and gesture modalities using the Nao robot platform.

Tomasevic Leo, ISTC National Research Council, Italy

Leo obtained a Laurea/MEng in Electronic Engineering at the University "la Sapienza" in Rome, Italy. He is currently investigating sensorimotor control in humans at LET'S (Laboratory of Electrophysiology for Translational neuroScience), part of the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies in Rome. He is also PhD student at the University of Plymouth - Rome Node.

Tucker Roy, Plymouth University, UK

Roy is a PhD student in developmental robotics at the Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems of the University of Plymouth. His reserach is on informational visualisation for neuroscience data.

Guido Schillaci, Humboldt University Berlin, DE

Guido is a Ph.D. candidate at the Humboldt University Berlin. He is involved as an Early Stage Researcher in the Marie Curie Initial Training Network INTeractive RObotics (INTRO). His research topic is Behaviour and Intention Recognition for Human-Robot Learning. Embodied cognition, sensorimotor learning, developmental robotics, social interaction and theory of mind are milestones for his current research.

Benjamin Fonooni, Umeå University, SW

Benjamin is a PHD student at the Umeå University (Sweden) and involved in the Marie Curie Initial Training Network INTeractive RObotics (INTRO) as an Early Stage Researcher. His main research topics are developing techniques for robot learning, based on Learning from Demonstration and Imitation by utilizing various aspects of human-robot interaction.

Daniel Jachyra, University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow, PL

Daniel isa PhD student of professor Janusz Starzyk working on "Design of Motivated Embodied Intelligent Agents". In his research work he focuses on design and study of the mechanisms for motivated behavior, goal creation, and learning in autonomous agents.

Emanuel Sousa, University of Minho, PO

Emanuel received his MSc in Industrial Electronic Engineering and Computers from the University of Minho, Portugal. He currently works on the subject of learning and generalizing context-dependent representations of goal-directed actions in HRI scenarios, to allow robots to understand why particular actions are performed by human counterparts.

Amir Aly, ENSTA ParisTech, FR

Amir received his first BSc Degree in control engineering from Benha University in Egypt, then he followed it by a second BSc Degree in automation and signal processing from ENSISA in France. He prepared his MSc Degree in the image and sound processing department in university Pierre and Marie Curie (UPMC- Paris 6) in France. He is currently doing his PhD in ENSTA ParisTech which concerns understanding human activities in complex environments and emotional internal states using sound, image, and physiological feedbacks.

Kristína Rebrová , Comenius University, SK

Kristína obtained her Bachelor degree in Applied Informatics and Master Degree in Cognitive Science at Comenius University in Bratislava. She is currently doing her PhD in informatics, focusing on cognitive robotics. Her main research interests include modelling of action-understanding and early language acquisition, motor resonance, and mirror neurons.

Shashank Pathak , LIRA-Lab, University of Genova, IT

Shashank is a researcher based in LIRA-Lab, University of Genova. working under Giorgio Metta in IIT, Genova for eMorph project. Prior to this, he obtained his Bachelors degree from IIT-Delhi and a dual Masters from Warsaw University of Technology and University of Genova. His research interests are cognition, intelligent robotics, and safe scalable adaptive learning on complex robots/humanoids.