Title: To be announced

Gianmarco Veruggio is the Director of Research at Italian National Research Council and Responsible for the Genoa Branch of IEIIT, the Institute of Electronics, Computer and Telecommunication Engineering.

Gianmarco Veruggio founded the CNR Robotlab (1990-2003) with the aim to develop experimental robotics. His research interests encompass control system architectures for Internet robotics, human-robot interaction and educational robotics. He led the first Italian underwater robotics campaigns in Antarctica during the Italian expeditions in 1993, 1997 and 2001, and the first Italian underwater robotics campaign in Arctic during 2002.

In 2000 he founded the association “School of Robotics” to promote this new science among young people and the society at large by means of educational robotics. In 2002 he coined the word and proposed the concept of Roboethics. He was the General Chair of the “First International Symposium on Roboethics” in 2004 and of the “EURON Roboethics Atelier” in 2006 that produced the Roboethics Roadmap. For his merits in the field of science and society, in 2009 he was awarded the title of Commander of the Order to the Merit of the Italian Republic.

Title: Ethics in developing robot products

Robot application domains have increased significantly over recent years into service and medical sectors and new innovations continue to emerge with robotics being seen as a major new disruptive technology that will be applicable to virtually all sectors of society. The new robots being developed involve a variety of human-robot interaction and this has led to the development of new safety regulations on how the new situations shall be addressed internationally to prevent harm. Many of the new use case scenarios are also raising concerns which are more “soft” in nature; they include ethics, legal and other societal issues. The presentation will cover these “softer” issues relating to robotics and the need to ensure that these be addressed. The case is made to extend the existing regulatory framework to include ethics and societal issues in the development of new international robot products.

Professor Gurvinder S. Virk (BSc, PhD, DIC, FIET, FCIBSE, CEng, CMath, FIMA, MIEEE). Prof Virk is Technical Director at InnotecUK Limited in with responsibility to lead R&D projects and product development for realising inspection robots for hazardous applications; in addition, he is Adjunct Professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden and at IIT Ropar India. He holds a Ph.D. in Control Theory from Imperial College, University of London, UK and his current interests are in commercialisation of wearable exoskeleton robots for health and wellbeing, medical robots for rehabilitation, active and assistive living applications, robot safety standardisation, robot modularity and interoperability, social robotics and robot ethics. He gained valuable experience in strategic planning and people management through several academic leadership roles which he has held in UK (Universities of Bradford, Portsmouth and Leeds), New Zealand (Massey University) and Sweden (University of Gävle) as well as visiting Professor positions in China (Zhejiang University), France (Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris), and Germany (Fachhochschule Südwestfalen, Soest). He has been able to gather the best practice from these organisations and adopt it in his detailed activities to great effect. He is also Trustee and Treasurer of the UK registered charity CLAWAR whose mission is to advance robotics for the public benefit (see www.clawar.org).

He has extensive experience in project management and leading international R&D and standardisation projects. He has held several grants from national and European sources (total value ≈€20m), as well as industry. He has produced over 350 papers in these areas and 14 books, 16 PhDs successfully completed and currently supervising 3 PhD students. Prof. Virk is also a key actor in robot standardisation and is currently Convenor of several international robot standardisation groups, namely:

ISO TC299/SG1 Gaps and structure ISO TC299/WG2 Personal care robot safety, 2006-2016 IEC TC62/SC62A & ISO TC299/ JWG9 Medical electrical equipment and systems using robotic technology (medical robots) ISO TC299/WG6 Modularity for service robots These groups are developing important standards for new emerging robots.

He is Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET), Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Building Services Engineers (FCIBSE), Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (FIMA) as well as being Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He is a Chartered Engineer and a Chartered Mathematician. He has been awarded, the Freedom of the City of London for his work in promoting Information Technology.

Title: To be announced

Matthias Scheutz is a Professor in Cognitive and Computer Science in the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University. He earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1995 and a Joint Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Computer Science from Indiana University Bloomington in 1999. He has more than 250 peer-reviewed publications in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive modeling, robotics, and human-robot interaction. His current research focuses on complex cognitive and affective robots with natural language capabilities.

Title: Teaching privacy to domestic robots

It is clear that robots’ roles in our everyday lives are growing and we will share things with them more and more intimately. This is not mere science fiction but almost reality and certainty in the near future for developed countries. This need for adopting technology is clear due to many socio-economic drivers and so how delicate issues should be handled need to be explored to develop suitable approaches as robots are electro-mechanical entities with their own intelligence (that is already present in other devices such as smartphones). To be efficient, the intelligence is known as “degree of autonomy” needs to have access to information that is very sensitive and hence which should be handled carefully to respect privacy. In this keynote, we will present some real-world situations and how robot manufacturers may include intelligence in realising robot systems bearing in mind such sensitive issues.

Rodolphe Gelin (1965) started his career at CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission) where he worked for 10 years on mobile robots control for industrial applications and on rehabilitation robotics. There he led different teams working in robotics, virtual reality, and cognition. From 2006 to 2008, he was in charge of business development for Interactive System Program. He participated in the European Coordinating Action CARE that supported the ETP EUROP responsible for the definition of the robotic roadmap for the European Community.  In 2009, Rodolphe Gélin joined Aldebaran Robotics as the head of collaborative projects. He is presently the leader of the French project ROMEO that aims to develop a human size humanoid robot and the Research Director at Aldebaran Robotics.