Program

Alin Albu-Schäffer
DLR Institie of Robotics and Mechatronics and Technical University of Munich, Germany

Alin Albu-Schäffer received his M.S. in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Timisoara, Romania in 1993 and his Ph.D. in automatic control from the Technical University of Munich in 2002. Since 2012 he is the head of the Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Moreover, he is a professor at the Technical University of Munich, holding the Chair for "Sensor Based Robotic Systems and Intelligent Assistance Systems" at the School of Computation, Information and Technology. His personal research interests include robot design, modeling and control, nonlinear control, flexible joint and variable compliance robots, impedance and force control, physical human-robot interaction, bio-inspired robot design and control. He received several awards, including the IEEE King-Sun Fu Best Paper Award of the Transactions on Robotics in 2012 and 2014; several ICRA and IROS Best Paper Awards as well as the DLR Science Award. He was strongly involved in the development of the DLR light-weight robot and its commercialization through technology transfer to KUKA. He is the coordinator of euROBIN, the European network of excellence on intelligent robotics, IEEE Fellow and RAS-AdCom member.

Arash Ajoudani
Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa, Italy

Arash Ajoudani is the director of the Human-Robot Interfaces and Interaction (HRI²) laboratory at IIT. He is a recipient of the European Research Council (ERC) proof-of-concept grant 2023 Real-Move and the ERC starting grant 2019 (Ergo-Lean), the coordinator of the Horizon-2020 project SOPHIA, the co-coordinator of the Horizon-2020 project CONCERT, and a principal investigator of the HORIZON-MSCA project RAICAM, and the national projects LABORIUS, COROMAN, and ReFinger. He is a recipient of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Early Career Award 2021, and winner of the SmartCup Liguria award 2023, Amazon Research Awards 2019, of the Solution Award 2019 (MECSPE2019), of the KUKA Innovation Award 2018, of the WeRob best poster award 2018, and of the best student paper award at ROBIO 2013. His PhD thesis was a finalist for the Georges Giralt PhD award 2015 - best European PhD thesis in robotics. He was also a finalist for the best paper award on human-robot interaction at ICRA2024, the best paper award mobile manipulation at IROS 2022, the best paper award at Humanoids 2022 (oral category), the Solution Award 2020 (MECSPE2020), the best conference paper award at Humanoids 2018, the best interactive paper award at Humanoids 2016, the best oral presentation award at Automatica (SIDRA) 2014, and for the best manipulation paper award at ICRA 2012.

He is the author of the book "Transferring Human Impedance Regulation Skills to Robots" in the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics (STAR), and several publications in journals, international conferences, and book chapters. He is currently serving as an elected IEEE RAS AdCom member (2022-2024), and as chair and representative of the IEEE-RAS Young Professionals Committee, and as a Senior Editor of the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR). He has been serving as a member of scientific advisory committee and as an associate editor for several international journals and conferences such as IEEE RAL, ICRA, IROS, ICORR, etc. He is a scholar of the European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). His main research interests are in physical human-robot interaction, mobile manipulation, robust and adaptive control, assistive robotics, and tele-robotics.

Strahinja Dosen
Aalborg University, Denmark

Strahinja Dosen received the Diploma of Engineering in Electrical Engineering and the M.Sc. degree in Biomedical Engineering in 2000 and 2004, respectively, from the Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad, Serbia, and the Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Center for Sensory-Motor Interaction, Aalborg University, Denmark, in 2009. From 2011 to 2017, he worked as a Research Scientist at the Institute for Neurorehabilitation Systems, University Medical Center Gottingen, Germany, and then as an Associate Professor at the Department of Health Science and Technology (HST), Aalborg University (AAU). Currently, he is a Full Professor in the same Department and leads a research group on Neurorehabilitation Systems. Prof. Dosen was a principal investigator for AAU and HST in several EU (Tactility, Wearplex, Sixthsense, and SimBionics) and nationally (Robin, Remap, and Climb) funded projects. He published more than 120 manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals, and his main research interest is the closed-loop control of assistive robotic systems.

Petar Veličković
Google DeepMind and University of Cambridge, UK

Petar Veličković is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind, Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, and an Associate of Clare Hall, Cambridge. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge (Trinity College), obtained under the supervision of Pietro Liò. His research concerns geometric deep learning—devising neural network architectures that respect the invariances and symmetries in data (a topic he has co-written a proto-book about). He is recognized as an ELLIS Scholar in the Geometric Deep Learning Program. Particularly, he focuses on graph representation learning and its applications in algorithmic reasoning (featured in VentureBeat). He is the first author of Graph Attention Networks—a popular convolutional layer for graphs—and Deep Graph Infomax—a popular self-supervised learning pipeline for graphs (featured in ZDNet). His research has been used in substantially improving travel-time predictions in Google Maps (featured in the CNBC, Endgadget, VentureBeat, CNET, the Verge and ZDNet), guiding intuition of mathematicians towards new top-tier theorems and conjectures (featured in Nature, Science, Quanta Magazine, New Scientist, The Independent, Sky News, The Sunday Times, la Repubblica and The Conversation), and the first full AI system for tactical suggestions in association football (featured in Financial Times, The Economist, New Scientist, Wired, the Verge and El País).

Plenary speakers

Keynote speakers