Workshop Organisers

Dr. Cian O'Donovan

Senior Research Fellow in Innovation Studies, University College London, Dept, of Science and Technology Studies, UK

Dr O'Donovan's research the impacts of digital transformation on social care and use social care to study who benefits from forms of innovation and change like digital transformation more broadly; who pays for innovation; and who decides. He is the principal investigator leading Empowering Future Care Workforces: Scoping Capabilities to Leverage Assistive Robotics through Co-Design funded by the UKRI Trustworthy and Autonomous Systems Hub. His areas of research include:

Data policy that is needed to support post-pandemic digital transformations in care.

Empowerment: the kind of capabilities health and social care professionals working need so they can use technology like AI, robotics and autonomous systems on their own terms, in ways that increase their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of people they care for.

Public research infrastructures: the kind of knowledge, networks, ideas and capacity that is needed to co-create and evaluate innovation across the hugely diverse social and material settings care takes place in - from care homes, to sheltered housing to everyday domestic situations.

Professor Praminda Caleb-Solly

Professor of Embodied Intelligence, University of Nottingham, School of Computer Science, UK

Prof Caleb-Solly leads the Cyber-physical Health and Assistive Robotics Technologies (CHART) research group.

She holds degrees in Electronic Systems Engineering, Biomedical Instrumentation Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Interactive Evolutionary Computation. From 2014 to 2018 she was the Head of Electronics and Computer Systems at Designability, an assistive technology SME and charity. Prof Caleb-Solly's recent portfolio of Innovate UK, EPSRC, AHRC and EC funded research includes designing and evaluating socially and physically assistive robotics and Internet of Things sensor-based intelligent solutions. She is also currently leading an UK EPSRC Healthcare Technologies Network+ programme, EMERGENCE: Tackling Frailty - Facilitating the Emergence of Healthcare Robots from Labs into Service and is also part of the EU project METRICS working to develop new benchmarks for assistive robots. 

She co-authored the UK-Robotics and Autonomous Systems White Paper on Robotics in Social Care: A Connected Care EcoSystem for Independent Living; and gave evidence to the UK House of Lords’ Science and Technology Committee inquiry into Ageing: Science, Technology and Healthy Living. She serves as a member of the British Standards Institute’s Technical Committee on Service Robot Safety and Ethics. In 2020 she co-founded Robotics for Good CIC, a 'robotics as a service' start-up supporting the deployment of telepresence robots in different application domains.

Dr. Mauro Dragone

Associate Professor, Co-Director MSc Robotics, UK National Robotarium, Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, Institute of Sensors, Signals and Systems, School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University

Dr Dragone's research expertise includes robotics, human-robot interaction, autonomous agent systems, Internet of Things (IoT) and Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). He set up the Robotic Assisted Living Tested, a 'Living lab', part of the UK National Robotarium, designed to facilitate design and testing of innovative and practical solutions for healthy ageing and indipendent living. He has also initiated the Cognitive Assistive Robotic Enviroment (CARE) group, with a focus on enabling IoT and robotic, autonomous and interactive systems (RAIS) to provide user-centred assisted living support. He is currently involved in EU coordination actions developing new benchmarks for assistive robots (METRICS/HEART-MET), and leads OpenAAL, an open lab for AAL.He is also one of the co-investigators of the EPSRC Healthcare NetworkPlus EMERGENCE, developing the UK roadmap for assistive robotics for frailty.

Professor Filippo Cavallo

Professor in Biomedical Robotics, Head of BioRobotics Lab, Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Florence (RAS Technical Committee)

Prof. Filippo Cavallo received the Master Degree in Electronics Engineering, Curriculum Bioengineering, from the University of Pisa, Italy, and the Ph.D. degree in Bioengineering at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, Pisa, Italy. From 2013 to 2019, he was assistant professor and head and scientific responsible of the Assistive Robotics Lab at the BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. The objectives of his research activities are to promote and evaluate novel service robotics for active and healthy aging, to identify and validate disruptive healthcare paradigms for neurodegenerative and chronic diseases, focusing on prevention and support for physical and cognitive declines, to optimize the management of working life for improving efficiency, security and QoL of workers in industrial settings. The main scientific and technological challenges concern social robotics, human robot interaction, wearable sensors, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence for robot companion and healthcare applications.