Prof. Alessandro Di Nuovo Inaugural Lecture
How can robotic platforms help develop new artificial intelligence (AI) services to benefit society?
Alessandro Di Nuovo’s professorial lecture will showcase the latest research results and provide an overview of state-of-the-art developments in social robotics. The lecture will highlight the benefits and limitations of this technology and its potential breakthroughs, while emphasising responsible research that empowers people instead of replacing them.
Recent technological advances are stimulating the growth of AI, which is becoming ever more accessible for use in the real world. Advanced robotic platforms offer new ways for developing new AI services to benefit society. These robots provide a physical body that is a key component of the cognitive process, which can help create more capable intelligent agents with social abilities. One emerging field of research is neuro-robotics, which combines computational intelligence, neuroscience, and robotics to create artificial models of minds with human-like learning abilities based on biological cognition.
Multidisciplinary research in health and wellbeing has shown these advanced robots can be designed to transform lives by providing individualised assistance to people, such as children with autism or older adults with cognitive decline, while also collecting information that can be used to provide personalised quality care.
Alessandro’s bio
Alessandro Di Nuovo is Professor of Machine Intelligence at Sheffield Hallam University. He received the Laurea (MSc Eng) and the PhD in Informatics Engineering from the University of Catania, Italy, in 2005 and 2009, respectively.
At Sheffield Hallam’s Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, Alessandro is currently leader of Technological and Digital Innovations to Promote Independent Lives. He is a member of the Executive Group of Sheffield Robotics, an internationally recognised initiative of two Sheffield universities to support innovative and responsible research in robotics.
Alessandro has an extensive track record of leading interdisciplinary research and innovation in fundamental and applied topics in AI and robotics, for which he has received several grants from prestigious funders (EPSRC, European Union) and companies (IBM). He has published more than 100 articles on computational intelligence and robotics, including in prestigious journals like Nature Machine Intelligence.
Event Schedule:
17:00 Arrival
17:30 Professorial Lecture and Q&A
18:30 Drinks reception
19:30 Event close