Keynote Speakers

Sylvain Calinon

Idiap Reseaerch Institute, Switzerland

Frugal Learning of Robot Manipulation Skills [abstract]

Bio: Dr Sylvain Calinon is a Senior Research Scientist at the Idiap Research Institute and a Lecturer at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He heads the Robot Learning & Interaction group at Idiap, with expertise in human-robot collaboration, robot learning from demonstration, geometric representations and optimal control. The approaches developed in his group can be applied to a wide range of applications requiring manipulation skills, with robots that are either close to us (assistive and industrial robots), parts of us (prosthetics and exoskeletons), or far away from us (shared control and teleoperation). 

Oya Celiktutan
King's College London, United Kingdom 

Towards Socially Adaptive Robots: Behaviour Modelling, Interaction, and Evaluation [abstract]

Bio: Dr Oya Celiktutan is a Reader in AI and Robotics in the Department of Engineering at King’s College London, where she leads the Social AI & Robotics Laboratory. She is also the Honorary Robotics Lead at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, working closely with two hospitals to translate socially assistive robotic technologies into clinical settings. Her research focuses on multimodal machine learning for autonomous robots and virtual agents that interact naturally with humans, including multimodal perception, human behaviour understanding and generation, and socially aware navigation and manipulation. Her work has been supported by EPSRC, The Royal Society, and the EU Horizon programme, as well as industrial partners such as Toyota Motor Europe and NVIDIA. She received the EPSRC New Investigator Award in 2020, and her team has won several awards, including Best Paper at IEEE RO-MAN 2022 and recognition at IEEE FG 2021 and the ICCV UDIVA Challenge 2021. She is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction and a Program Chair of the International Conference on Social Robotics 2026.

Angelika Peer

Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

TITLE TBD [abstract]

Bio: TBD

Cristian Secchi

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

Building a Safe and Seamless Human-Robot Synergy: the Energy Tank approach [abstract]

Bio: is a Full Professor of Robotics at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. He received his Ph.D in Information Engineering from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in 2004. His thesis on interactive robotic interfaces has been selected as finalist for the Georges Giralt PhD Award for the best PhD thesis on robotics in Europe. He served as an Associate Editor of the Robotics and Automation Magazine (2005-2008), the Transactions on Robotics (2012-2017), the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2015-2017) and for the International Journal or Robotics (2023-). He served in the editorial boards of the major robotics conferences, and he was the program chair of the 2024 European Robotics Forum, the most influential meeting of the robotics community in Europe. He coordinated and participated to several national and European projects and to several research activities funded by industries. He is the Director of the ARSControl lab of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. His main research interests are in the fields of human-robot collaboration, multi-robot systems and medical robotics. In particular, he is interested in energy based methods for achieving a smooth safe and stable interaction between humans and robots in different application areas. He is author of more than 300 scientific articles published on conference proceedings and on international journals, including one book and two patents.