Invited Speakers
Roland Auberger
Otto Bock Healthcare
Roland Auberger was born in Linz, Austria in 1977. He received his master degree (Dipl.-Ing.) in Mechatronics from the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria in 2002. From 2002 to 2004, he was a Research Assistant at the Institute for Robotics at the Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria. Since 2004 he is with the research and development department of Otto Bock Healthcare Products GmbH, Vienna, Austria. Since 2015 he is also member of the Sensory-Motor Systems (SMS) Lab, Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IRIS), Department of Health Sciences and Technology (D-HEST), ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He is author of nine granted patents and several patent applications. His research interests include intelligent orthotics and prosthetics, lower limb exoskeletons, and rehabilitation robotics.
Gordon Cheng
Technical University of Munich
Gordon Cheng holds the Chair of Cognitive Systems at Technical University of Munich (TUM). He is Founder and Director of the Institute for Cognitive Systems in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at TUM. He is also the coordinator of the CoC for Neuro-Engineering – Center of Competence Neuro-Engineering within the department and program director of the ENB Elite Master of Science program in Neuroengineering. He is also involved in a number of major European Union Projects.
Over the past years Gordon Cheng has been the co-inventor of approximately 20 patents and is the author of approximately 300 technical publications, proceedings, editorials and book chapters.
Martin Giese
University of Tübingen
M. Giese has studied Electrical Engineering and Psychology at the Ruhr
University in Bochum. After a Postdoc at the Dept. of Brain and
Cognitive Science at M.I.T., he founded in 2000 the Boston Research
Laboratory of Honda Americas. From 2001 to 2007, he was leader of a
Junior Research Group at the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain
Research at the University of Tübingen. He received his habilitation
at the Department of Informatics at the University of Ulm. From 2007
to 2008 he was Senior Lecturer at the Department of Psychology at the
University of Wales, Bangor. Since 2008 he is head of the Section for
Computational Sensomotorics at the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience
and the Hertie Institute at the University Clinic Tübingen. His
scientific interests are neuroscience and related technical
applications. The main topic of his lab are the perception and control
of complex body motion, related neural models, and technical and
clinical applications of learning-based representations for the
synthesis and analysis of complex body movements.
Herman van der Kooij
University of Twente
Prof. Dr. ir. Herman van der Kooij, chairs the BioMechatronics group. Hereceived his Phd with honors (cum laude) in 2000 and is professor in Biomechatronics and Rehabilitation Technology at the Department of Biomechanical Engineering at the University of Twente (0.8 fte), and Delft University of Technology (0.2fte), the Netherlands. His expertise and interests are in the field of human balance and motor control, adaptation, and learning. He combines experiments with neuro-mechanical models. His group designed various rehabilitation, wearable robots, diagnostic, and assistive robotics. Examples are the gait rehabilitation robot LOPES and the Mindwalker wearable exoskeleton. He has published over 170 peer-reviewed publications in the area of biomechatronics and human motor control. He is frequently invited as (keynote) speaker at international conferences. He received several award, among were the prestigious Dutch VIDI and VICI personnel grants for excellent researchers in 2001 and 2015 respectively. He is associate editor of IEEE TBME and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, member of IEEE EMBS technical committee of Biorobotics and of the advisory board of the IEEE conference BIOROB, chair of the IEEE BIOROB2018 conference, and was member of numerous scientific program committees in the field of rehabilitation robotics, bio robotics, and assistive devices. He participated in seven EU projects and was the coordinator of the European FP7 project Symbitron. Currently he leads the Dutch national program Wearable Robotics and the Dutch national 4TU Soft Robotics program.
Angelika Peer
Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
Angelika Peer is Full Professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano
(Italy) since November 2017. From 2014 to 2017 she was Full Professor at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. Before she was senior researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering and TUM-IAS Junior Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Technical University of Munich, Germany. She received the Diploma Engineering degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology in 2004 and the Doctor of Engineering degree in 2008 from the Technical University of Munich. Her research interests include robotics, control and human system interaction.
Domenico Prattichizzo
University of Siena
Professor of Robotics at the University of Siena, Senior Scientist at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Genova, Fellow of the IEEE society, President of Eurohaptics Society, and Co-founder of the startup WEART, a startup for VR and AR applications. Human and robotic hands together with the art of manipulating real and virtual objects have always polarized his research that has recently focused on wearable haptics, VR/AR and wearable robotics. He founded the SIRSLab where he has been leading an extraordinary and enthusiastic research team for years. From 2013 to 2017 he has been the overall coordinator of the strategic project “ WEARHAP: wearable haptics for humans and robots ” founded by the European Community with applications on virtual and augmented realities and to collaborative robotics. In 2010 he co-ordinated the project on “REMOTOUCH: remote touch” tactile communication, selected for the presentation at Expo Shangai 2010 under the initiative of “Italia degli Innovatori” promoted by the Ministry of Innovation. Awarded in 2014 with the MathWorks Education Award. In 2017, in Phoenix, his project “the Robotics Sixth Finger” was selected among the best innovative projects at the Wearable Robotics Association Conference, wearRAcon.
He has held many plenary talks on robotics, including the most recent at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (2016) and the International Conference on Asia Haptics (2017) where he won the award fir his research activities in virtual reality. He has been selected among the best two Cross-Cutting Challenges Initiatives at the IEEE Haptic Symposium 2018 in San Francisco with the theme “The path to intelligent clothes and objects able to change the way we communicate with the world”. Author of more than 250 scientific articles in the field of robotics and virtual reality.
Robert Riener
ETH Zürich
Robert Riener is full professor for Sensory-Motor Systems at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, and full professor of medicine at the University Hospital Balgrist, University of Zurich. His work focuses on the investigation of the sensory-motor interactions between humans and machines and the development of user-cooperative rehabilitation robots, exoskeletons and virtual reality technologies. Riener is the initiator and organizer of the Cybathlon. In 2018 Riener obtained the honorary doctoral degree from the University of Basel.
Arndt Schilling
University Medical Center Göttingen
Arndt Schilling is a medical doctor and a molecular biologist by training and a scientist and inventor out of passion. He held professorships in Biomaterial Research and Experimental Plastic Surgery at the Technical Universities of Hamburg-Harburg and Munich and is now leading research and development at the Clinic of Trauma Surgery, Orthopaedics and Plastic Surgery at UMG. Here he founded the Applied Rehabilitation Technology Lab to explore with his team how to make novel technologies available to enable doctors to improve the life of their patients.
Andre Seyfarth
Technical University of Darmstadt
Since July 2011 Andre Seyfarth has been head of the Department of Sports Biomechanics at the Institute of Sports Science at the TU Darmstadt. Previously, from 2003 to 2011, he established the Lauflabor working group (lauflabor.de) in Jena, which has also completely moved to Darmstadt since 2012. His research focuses on experimental motion studies on humans and animals, biomechanical and neuromuscular motion models as well as technical research systems (e.g. walking robots, prostheses, demonstrators).
Patrick van der Smagt
Volkswagen Group Machine Learning Research Lab
Patrick van der Smagt is director of the open-source Volkswagen Group Machine Learning Research Lab in Munich, focussing on probabilistic deep learning for time series modelling, optimal control, reinforcement learning, robotics, and quantum machine learning. He previously directed a lab as professor for machine learning and biomimetic robotics at the Technical University of Munich while leading the machine learning group at the research institute fortiss, and before founded and headed the Assistive Robotics and Bionics Lab at the DLR Oberpfaffenhofen. He is founding chairman of a non-for-profit organisation for Assistive Robotics for tetraplegics and co-founder of various tech companies.
Gerwin Smit
Technical University of Delft
Gerwin Smit is an assistive professor at the department of biomechanical engineering (BME) at TU Delft. His research focuses on how to design innovative prosthetic devices using the newest technologies. These devices should be comfortable to be worn, and they should be intuitively controllable by the prosthesis user, with little effort. Besides the research on prosthetic hands, he also works on the development of a new prosthetic knee, and on other medical and rehabilitation assisting devices.
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