Organizers

Alessandra Sciutti
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia

Alessandra Sciutti received her Ph.D. in Humanoid Technologies from the University of Genoa (Italy) in 2010. After an experience of one year at the Robotics Lab of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, she is currently working as a Researcher at the Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department of the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). Currently, she is visiting the Emergent Robotics Lab of the Osaka University. Her research activity mainly concerns how motor control and perception laws apply to human- human and human- robot interaction.


Katrin Solveig Lohan
Heriot-Watt University

Katrin Solveig Lohan joined the school of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University as a Lecturer in 2013. She is deputy director of the Robotics Lab. Previously, she was working at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), as a junior Post Doc in the RobotDoc project founded by the Marie Curie Fellowship. She obtained her Ph.D. in Engineering from Bielefeld University, Germany in 2012, where she was associated with the ITALK Project as Ph.D. student. Her main research interests are in understanding the learning mechanisms between parents and infant, between adults and adults, and between humans and robots in order to create a natural interaction with a robot.


Yukie Nagai
Osaka University

Yukie Nagai is a Specially Appointed Associate Professor at Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University in Japan. She received her Ph.D. in Engineering from Osaka University in 2004 and worked as a postdoc researcher at National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Kyoto from 2004 to 2006. She then worked at Bielefeld University, Germany for three and a half year until she started her current position at Osaka University in October 2009. Her research interests include the developmental mechanism of human social cognition such as self/other cognition, imitation, joint attention, and cooperation. She has been investigating how human infants acquire such abilities through interaction with their caregivers by means of constructive approaches.