TUTORIALS

Manuela Chessa, University of Genoa, Italy

Manuela Chessa is Associate Professor in Computer Science at Dept. of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics, and Systems Engineering at the University of Genoa. Her research interests focus on developing natural human-machine interfaces based on virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, on the perceptual and cognitive aspects of interaction in VR and AR, on the development of bioinspired models, and the study of biological and artificial vision systems. She studies the use of novel sensing and 3D tracking technologies and visualization devices to develop natural and ecological interaction systems, always having human perception in mind. Recently, she addressed the coherent and natural combination of virtual reality and the real world to obtain robust and effective extended reality systems. She has been the Program chair of the HUCAPP International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction Theory and Applications. She has been the chair of the BMVA Technical Meeting – Vision for human-computer interaction and virtual reality systems, Lecturer of the tutorial Natural Human-Computer-Interaction in Virtual and Augmented Reality, VISIGRAPP 2017, and Lecturer for the tutorial Active Vision and Human Robot Collaboration at ICIAP 2017 and ICVS2019. She has been the keynote speaker of the IEEE VR workshop ReDigiTS “3D Reconstruction, Digital Twinning, and Simulation for Virtual Experiences“. She organized the first four editions of the tutorial CAIVARS at ISMAR 2018, 2020, 2021, and 2022. She is the author of more than 90 papers in international book chapters, journals, and conference proceedings and co-inventor of 3 patents.

Guido Maiello, University of Southampton, UK

Guido Maiello is Lecturer at the School of Psychology of the University of Southampton, UK. Previously he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Justus Liebig University Giessen, in Germany. In 2017, Dr Maiello completed a doctoral program in Visual Neuroscience at University College London. During his doctoral studies Dr Maiello held Visiting Researcher positions at Harvard Medical School, Northeastern University, and the University of Genoa. His doctoral work spanned the topics of human depth perception, motor control, virtual reality technology and clinical vision. The main focus of his research has been to translate findings from basic vision science into meaningful technological and clinical applications. Dr Maiello has authored 26 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, >50 abstracts and conference papers in international meetings, and one international patent. He is the Academic Editor at the generalist journal PLOS One, serves as reviewer for >30 international journals, and as grant reviewer for the European Commission, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Israel Ministry of Innovation, Science and Technology. Dr Maiello further serves as Committee Member for the Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting (VSS), the ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research & Applications (ETRA), and the International Conference on Human Computer Interaction Theory and Applications (HUCAPP). Dr Maiello’s research program investigates how we employ our sense of sight to guide how we grasp objects. Through targeted investigations of human behaviour in AR and VR he aims to uncover the visuomotor neural computations that allow us to pick up and manipulate objects with our hands.

Dimitri Ognibene, University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy

Dimitri Ognibene is Associate Professor of Human Technology Interaction at University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. Currently, he is Director of BiConnect, Center for Human Technology Connection Research at Università Milano-Bicocca. His main interest lies in understanding how social agents with limited sensory and computational resources adapt to complex and uncertain environments, how this can induce suboptimal behaviors, such as addiction or antisocial behaviors, and how this understanding may be applied to real life problems.  To this end he develops both neural and Bayesian models and applies them both in physical, e.g. robots, and virtual, e.g. social media, settings. Before joining Milano Bicocca University, he was at the University of Essex as Lecturer in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from October 2017 having moved from University Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) where he was a Marie Curie Actions COFUND fellow. Previously he developed algorithms for active vision in industrial robotic tasks as a Research Associate (RA) at Centre for Robotics Research, Kings’ College London; He developed Bayesian methods and robotic models for attention in social and dynamic environments as an RA at the Personal Robotics Laboratory in Imperial College London.  He studied the interaction between active vision and autonomous learning in neuro-robotic models as an RA at the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technologies of the Italian Research Council (ISTC CNR). He also collaborated with the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging (UCL) to study how to model exploration in the active inference modeling paradigm. He has been Visiting Researcher at Bounded Resource Reasoning Laboratory in UMass and at University of Reykjavik (Iceland) exploring the symmetries between active sensor control and active computation or metareasoning. He obtained his PhD in Robotics in 2009 from University of Genoa with a thesis titled “Ecological Adaptive Perception from a Neuro-Robotic perspective: theory, architecture and experiments” and graduated in Information Engineering at the University of Palermo in 2004. He is associate editor of Cognitive Computation and Systems, handling editor of Cognitive Processing, review-editor for Paladyn – The journal of Behavioral Robotics, Frontiers Bionics and Biomimetics, and Frontiers Computational Intelligence in Robotics, guest associate editor for Frontiers in Neurorobotics and Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience. He has been chair of the robotics area of several conferences and workshops.

Fabio Solari, University of Genoa

Fabio Solari is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics, and Systems Engineering of the University of Genoa. His research activity concerns the study of visual perception with the aim to design novel bio-inspired artificial vision systems and to develop natural human-computer interactions in virtual and augmented reality. In particular, his research interests are related to computational models of motion and depth estimation, space-variant visual processing, and scene interpretation. Such models are able to replicate relevant aspects of human experimental data. This can help to improve virtual and augmented reality systems in order to provide a natural perception and interaction. Moreover, he is interested in the perceptual assessment of virtual/augmented/extended reality systems, with specific attention to the perceptual and cognitive aspects, and in the development of systems that allow a natural experience and ecological human-computer interactions. He is the principal investigator of three international projects: Interreg Alcotra CLIP “E-Santé/Silver Economy”, PROSOL “Jeune”, and PROSOL “Senior”. He has participated in five European projects: FP7-ICT, EYESHOTS, and SEARISE; FP6-IST-FET, DRIVSCO; FP6-NEST, MCCOOP; FP5-IST-FET, ECOVISION. He is a reviewer for Italian PRIN and FIRB projects, Marie Curie fellowships and ERC. He was general chair of the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing, Applications and Systems in 2020 (IEEE IPAS 2020, online) and in 2022 (IEEE IPAS 2022, 5-7 December 2022, Genova, Italy). He has a pending International Patent Application (WO2013088390) on augmented reality, and two Italian Patent Applications on virtual (No. 0001423036) and augmented (No. 0001409382) reality.

Nikhil Deshpande, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Italy.

Nikhil Deshpande is is a Researcher and Head of the Vicarios Mixed Reality and Simulations Lab at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Italy. His research focuses on improving situational awareness for human users in advanced telerobotics systems, utilizing holistic approaches in mixed reality and robot learning. In particular, keeping user-centered design as the core, Nikhil examines the role that robotics and mixed reality technology can play in simplifying the life of human users operating in diverse and difficult environments, e.g., telesurgery, disaster response, etc. To that end, the following topics are currently being investigated, among others: (1) mixed reality as an intuitive and immersive medium for remote telerobotics, combining robot digital twins with ego- & exo-centric remote visualization; (2) intuitive and natural gesture mapping between human gestures and robot motions, independent of user viewpoint; (3) intelligent streaming and gaze-contingent rendering of real-time 3D visualization data in immersive remote telerobotics to reduce bandwidth and latency using deep learning and semantic scene understanding; (4) immersive multi-user mixed reality with real-time 3D reconstruction of remote environments, combined with real-time encountered-type haptic feedback. The outcomes of these investigations are directly applied in nationally funded projects that Nikhil has coordinated, including “Sistemi Cibernetici Collaborativi – Robot Teleoperativo” (3 + 3 years; €3.16 + €2.0 mil) and “Sistemi Cibernetici Collaborativi – Cadute dall’Alto” (3 years; €2.0 mil). Previously, Nikhil focused on the design, development, and evaluation of novel surgical devices, surgeon-machine telesurgery interfaces, and controllers for robot-assisted surgeries. Nikhil received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University (NCSU), USA in 2012, investigating intelligent autonomous navigation, leveraging interaction with wireless sensor networks. Nikhil has successfully organized workshops at leading robotics conferences, including IEEE/RSJ IROS, ICAR, etc., and given invited talks at international events and universities, including KAIST, Ewha Womans Univ, IITs-India, etc.