Robotics Young Talents

Alessandro Francolini – CEO CICERO – Digital Innovation Hub Lazio (Italy)

Alessandro Francolini graduated in 1985 in Engineering from Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” di Roma. He attended the Management Master Executive Program at New York Columbia University and the Executive Sales Management Program at the University of Pennsylvania.He held the position of General Manager in Ericsson Telecommunications SpA until 2020 and was Vice President Ericsson Networks and Vice President Ericsson Service in the South East Europe Market Unit. From 2012 to 2017 he was responsible for Ericsson activities in Israel and Member of the Board of Directors LM Ericsson Israel LTD. He was responsible for Ericsson global Telecom Italia business from June 2007 to January 2018 with a focus on the markets in Italy, Europe and Latin America.He was Vice-President for Unindustria with focus on relationships with University, Research and Technology Transfer. He currently holds the role of CEO of CICERO Digital Innovation Hub Lazio.

Tamim Asfour – Professor at the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics – Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany)

Tamim Asfour is full Professor of Humanoid Robotics and the Director of the High Performance Humanoid Technologies Lab (H2T) of the Institute of Anthropomatics and Robotics at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. His research focuses on the engineering 24/7 humanoid robotics. In particular, he studies the mechano-informatics of humanoids as the synergetic integration of informatics, artificial intelligence, and mechatronics into complete humanoid robot systems, which learn from humans, experience and interaction with the environment to perform versatile tasks in the real world. Tamim is the developer of the ARMAR humanoid robot family. He has been a visiting professor at Georgia Tech, at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, and at the National University of Singapore.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE-RAS Humanoids Conference Editorial Board, the Spokesperson of the Robotics Institute Germany (RIG), the president of the Executive Board of the German Robotics Society (DGR), and the scientific spokesperson of the KIT Center “Information · Systems · Technologies” (KCIST).

Yasuhisa Hirata – Professor in the Department of Robotics at Tohoku University (Japan)

Yasuhisa Hirata is a Professor in the Department of Robotics at Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan. He received his B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Tohoku University in 1998, 2000, and 2004, respectively. He has been conducting research on Human-Robots Interaction, Multiple Robots Coordination, Factory Automation Robots, etc. He is serving as a project manager of the Moonshot R&D program in Japan. He is also serving as an AdCom member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) and chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee Cluster on The Health and Medical Robotics.

Hermano Igo Krebs – Principal Research Scientist – Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT (USA)

Dr. Hermano Igo Krebs is a Principal Research Scientist and Lecturer at MIT’s Mechanical Engineering Department and the Director of The77Lab (http://the77lab.mit.edu/). He holds an affiliate position as a Visiting Professor at Fujita Health University, Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (Japan), at Osaka University, Mechanical Science and Bioengineering Department (Japan), at Keio University,  Department of System Design Engineering (Japan) and at Loughborough University, Rehabilitation Robotics of The Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical, and Manufacturing Engineering (UK). He is a Fellow of the IEEE and was nominated to this distinguished engineering status “for contributions to rehabilitation robotics and the understanding of neuro-rehabilitation.”  He received “The 2009 Isabelle and Leonard H. Goldenson Technology and Rehabilitation Award,” from the Cerebral Palsy International Research Foundation (CPIRF), the 2015 IEEE-INABA Technical Award for Innovation leading to Production “for contributions to medical technology innovation and translation into commercial applications for Rehabilitation Robotics,” and he was selected as a 2021 IEEE-EMBS Distinguished Lecturer (2021/2022). He was one of the founders and the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Interactive Motion Technologies from 1998 to 2016. He successfully sold it to Bionik Laboratories, a publicly traded company. He later founded 4Motion Robotics.

Alfonso Celotto – Full Professor of Constitutional Law at the Department of Law, Università degli Studi Roma Tre (Italy)

Alfonso Celotto is Full Professor of Constitutional Law at the Department of Law, University of Roma Tre. Graduated with honors and dignity of publication from the Faculty of Law of the Università degli Studi-Guido Carli, he obtained the Ph.D. in Constitutional Law and General Public Law in the Faculty of Law of the Università degli Studi “La Sapienza” di Roma. He has been Visiting Professor of the U.B.A. – Universidad de Buenos Aires; the University of Warsaw and Mc Gill University in Montreal. He has carried out academic and research activities in Italy, France, Spain, Peru, Argentina, Poland, Canada and Australia. He has held numerous institutional positions and has collaborated before the Constitutional Court and the Administrative Magistrates’ Courts. Alfonso Celotto is mainly concerned with the study, also from a comparative point of view, of issues relating to the system of sources, relations between national systems and the European Union system, constitutional justice, the protection of fundamental rights, artificial intelligence and the law of robotics. He is the author of more than 400 monographs, articles, notes and encyclopedic entries in leading scholarly journals.