Francesco Nori (Director of Robotics at Google DeepMind)
Francesco was born in Padova, and he received his D.Eng. degree (highest honors) from the University of Padova (Italy) in 2002. During the year 2002 he was a member of the UCLA Vision Lab as a visiting student under the supervision of Prof. Stefano Soatto, University of California Los Angeles. During this collaboration period he started a research activity in the field of computational vision and human motion tracking. In 2003 Francesco Nori started his Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Ruggero Frezza at the University of Padova, Italy. During this period the main topic of his research activity was modular control with special attention on biologically inspired control structures. Francesco Nori received his Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems from the University of Padova (Italy) in 2005. In the year 2006 he moved to the University of Genova and started his PostDoc at the laboratory for integrated advanced robotics (LiraLab), beginning a fruitful collaboration with Prof. Giorgio Metta and Prof. Giulio Sandini. In 2007 Francesco Nori moved to the Italian Institute of technology where in 2015 he was appointed Tenure Track Researcher of the Dynamic and Interaction Control research line. His research interests are currently focused on whole-body motion control exploiting multiple (possibly compliant) contacts. With Giorgio Metta and Lorenzo Natale he is one of the key researchers involved in the iCub development, with specific focus on control and whole-body force regulation exploiting tactile information. Francesco is currently coordinating the H2020-EU project An.Dy (id. 731540); in the past he has been involved in two FP7-EU projects: CoDyCo as coordinator and Koroibot as principal investigator. In 2017 Francesco joined Deepmind where he collaborated with Raia Hadsell, Nando de Freitas, Martin Riedmiller and Dan Belov. His current interests seamlessly span robotics and artificial intelligence, with applications in both manipulation and locomotion. In 2023, Deepmind joined forces with Google Brain to form Google Deepmind; at present Francesco is director of robotics at Google Deepmind and his group of collaborators has significantly increased. Francesco currently leads the Google Deepmind robotics research effort with Nicolas Heess, Carolina Parada, Kanishka Rao, Razvan Surdulescu and Vincent Vanhoucke (senior director of robotics).
Keynotes of 16th April 2025
Marco Dorigo (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
Marco Dorigo received the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering in 1992 from Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy. From 1992 to 1993, he was a Research Fellow at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA. In 1993, he was a NATO-CNR Fellow, and from 1994 to 1996, a Marie Curie Fellow. Since 1996, he has been a tenured Researcher of the FNRS, the Belgian National Funds for Scientific Research, and co-director of IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence laboratory of the ULB. His current research interests include swarm intelligence, swarm robotics, and metaheuristics for discrete optimization. He is the Founding Editor of Swarm Intelligence, and an Associate Editor or member of the Editorial Boards of many journals on computational intelligence and adaptive systems. Dr. Dorigo is a Fellow of the AAAI, EurAI, and IEEE. He was awarded the Italian Prize for Artificial Intelligence in 1996, the Marie Curie Excellence Award in 2003, the Dr. A. De Leeuw-Damry-Bourlart award in applied sciences in 2005, the Cajastur International Prize for Soft Computing in 2007, an ERC Advanced Grant in 2010, the IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award in 2015, and the IEEE Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award, awarded in 2016
Wan Kyun Chung, IEEE Fellow (POSTECH, KOREA)
Dr. Chung received the B.S. degree in mechanical design from Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea, in 1981, and the M.S. degree in mechanical engineering and the Ph.D. degree in production engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea, in 1983 and 1987, respectively. Dr. Chung is currently Professor of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Pohang University of Science and Technology. His research interests include development of robust controllers for precision motion control, biomedical robotics, and AI-based biorobotics with sponsorship by national agencies (Korea Research Foundation, Department of Commerce and Industry) and industries. He has published over 180 journal papers and 350 refereed conference papers. He has more than 11,000 citations and his H-index is 52. Dr. Chung has served as a program committee member for IEEE ICRA and IROS almost every year. He served as a Conference Local Arrangement Chair for 1999 IEEE/IROS conference, VIDEO proceeding chair in 2001 ICRA. He served as an Editor for IEEE Transactions on Robotics from 2008 to 2013, Editor-in-Chief for Intelligent Service Robotics by Springer Nature during 2016-2022, and International Editorial board for Advanced Robotics. He is a co-author of 3 books published by Springer-Verlag. In 1988, he was a Visiting Professor with the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. In 1995, he was a Visiting Scholar with University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Keynote of 17th April 2025
Samuele Vinanzi (Sheffield Hallam University )
Dr Samuele Vinanzi is a Senior Lecturer in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). He has obtained his BSc and MSc in Computer Engineering at the University of Palermo (Italy) and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Manchester (UK). He specializes in Cognitive Robotics, an interdisciplinary field that integrates robotics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and psychology to create intelligent robotic systems capable of human-like perception, reasoning and interaction with their environment. His focus is on enabling social collaboration between humans and robots, investigating topics such as emotional intelligence, artificial trust and intention reading. He has recently signed a contract with Oxford University Press to publish a book on trust relationships between humans and robots.
Francesco Ferro (CEO of PAL Robotics, Spain)
Francesco Ferro, is the CEO, co-founder and owner of PAL Robotics, one of the leading service robotics companies worldwide. PAL Robotics’ mission is to enhance people’s quality of life through service robotics and automation technologies, and the company shares a belief that robots will come to occupy a place in people’s daily lives.
Francesco received a BSc+MSc degree in Telecommunications Engineering at the Politecnico di Torino (Italy), a Master at ISEN in Lille (France) and an Executive MBA at the University of Barcelona (Spain) and participate to several conference and workshop worldwide. Since 2004 he has been working in the development of state-of-the-art robots especially designed to solve customers’ needs, working on several robots. PAL Robotics develops state-of-the-art robots designed to solve customers needs, such as TALOS, and Kangaroo humanoid biped robots for research; TIAGo Base, an Autonomous Mobile Robot created to enhance logistics; StockBot, an autonomous retail inventory and data-collection solution; TIAGo and TIAGo Pro, a humanoid robot that combines perception, navigation, manipulation & Human-Robot Interaction, and ARI, the humanoid platform designed for HRI and front-desk activities. Recently, PAL Robotics has also been working on the development of Kangaroo, a jumping, resilient robot. Since September 2020 Francesco has also been president and the sole owner of PAL France Sas, a French company from Toulouse specialised in the development of robotic algorithms for humanoid robots. In September 2023, PAL Robotics also opened a branch in Bari called PAL Italy S.r.l. Francesco is Executive Director and treasurer at euRobotics, part of the Board of Directors and Vice President at ADRA (AI, Data, Robotics Association), and Service Robot Committee Chair for IFR (International Federation of Robotics).
He also be part of the Board of Directors at HispaRob and AER Automation Spanish Robotics Association.