Alessandra Sciutti

Alessandra Sciutti is a Tenure Track Researcher and head of the CONTACT (COgNiTive Architecture for Collaborative Technologies) Unit of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Bioengineering and her Ph.D. in Humanoid Technologies from the University of Genova in 2010. After two research periods in the USA and Japan, in 2018, she was awarded the ERC Starting Grant wHiSPER (www.whisperproject.eu), focused on the investigation of joint perception between humans and robots. She has published more than 100 papers and abstracts in international journals and conferences, coordinates the ERC POC Project ARIEL (Assessing Children Manipulation and Exploration Skills), and has participated in the coordination of the CODEFROR European IRSES project (https://www.codefror.eu/). She is currently Chief Editor of the HRI Section of Frontiers in Robotics and AI and Associate Editor for several journals, including the International Journal of Social Robotics, the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, and Cognitive System Research. She is an ELLIS scholar and the corresponding co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee for Cognitive Robotics. Her research aims to investigate the sensory and motor mechanisms underlying mutual understanding in human-human and human-robot interaction. For more details on her research and the full list of publications, please check the Contact Unit website or her Google Scholar profile

Lucca Iochi

Prof. Luca Iocchi (www.diag.uniroma1.it/iocchi) is Full Professor at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, mainly teaching in the Master in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics and member of the Board of Professors of PhD in Engineering of Computer Science (of which he has been coordinator from 2020 to 2023). His main research interests include cognitive robotics, task planning, multi-robot coordination, robot perception, robot learning, human-robot interaction, and social robotics. He is the author of over 200 referred papers in journals and conferences in artificial intelligence and robotics. He is currently Associate Editor of Artificial Intelligence Journal and organized several scientific events. He has been principal investigator of several international, EU, national and industrial projects in artificial intelligence and robotics. He is currently scientific coordinator of Spoke % of PNRR project FAIR (Future AI Research). He is member of the Board of Trustees of RoboCup Federation (Vice-President from 2019 to 2024) and contributed to benchmarking domestic service robots through scientific competitions within RoboCup@Home and the European Robotics League Service Robots (ERL-SR), of which he has been a member of the Organizing Committees since their origin. He organized several international scientific robot competitions, as well as student competitions focussing on service robots and human-robot interaction (including ERL-SR, European RoboCupJunior Championship, and RoboCup@Home Education Challenges). He has also supervised the development of teams participating in robot competitions.