Abstract - Mario Di Bernardo

Designing artificial avatars able to interact with humans in a safe, smart and natural way is a current open problem in control. Solving such an issue will allow the design of cyber-agents capable of co-operatively interacting with people in order to fulfil common joint tasks in a multitude of different applications. This is particularly relevant in the context of healthcare applications. Indeed, the use for rehabilitation has been proposed of artificial agents able to interact and coordinate their movements with those of patients suffering from social or motor disorders. Moreover, it has also been shown that the level of motor coordination between the avatar and the human patient is enhanced if the kinematic properties of the avatar's motion are similar to those of the individual it is interacting with. In this lecture, I will introduce the problem of analysing human movement coordination in dyads and groups and use the results of the analysis to develop cognitive architectures based on feedback control principles and machine learning to drive artificial avatars so as to confer ``human motor characteristics'' on the motion of the virtual agent. Both scenarios where the avatar needs to interact with one individual or merge in a group or team to perform some joint task will be considered. Applications to health, social psychology and robotics will be used as representative cases of study.

Mario di Bernardo (SMIEEE ’06, FIEEE 2012) is Professor of Automatic Control at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy and Visiting Professor of Nonlinear Systems and Control at the University of Bristol, U.K. He currently serves as Deputy pro-Vice Chancellor for Internationalization at the University of Naples and coordinates the research area on Modeling and Engineering Risk and Complexity of the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, the new School of Advanced Studies located in Naples. On 28th February 2007 he was bestowed the title of Cavaliere of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for scientific merits from the President of Italy. He was elevated to the grade of Fellow of the IEEE in January 2012 for his contributions to the analysis, control and applications of nonlinear systems and complex networks.

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