Prof. Aszmann joined the Division of Plastic Surgery in Vienna, Austria in 1998 where he now holds the position of Associate Professor of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. Both his research and clinical focus have always been peripheral nerve reconstruction and extremity/hand rehabilitation. Since 2006 he has entered a close collaboration with the company Otto Bock to explore the possibilities and limits of bionic reconstruction which has now led to the establishment of a Center for Extremity Reconstruction and Rehabilitation. This Center has at its core interest the recovery and rehabilitation patients with impaired extremity function.

Antonio Bicchi is a scientist interested in Robotics and Machine Intelligence. After graduating from the University of Bologna, he has been with the MIT AI Lab in Cambridge, USA, and is now Professor of Robotics at the University of Pisa, Dept. of Information Engineering. Since 2009 he leads the Soft Robotics Lab at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genoa, and from 2013 he is Adjunct Professor at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
He has published more than 500 peer reviewed papers on international journals, books, and refereed conferences. His 2012-2017 ERC Advanced Grant “SoftHands” established the basis for the theory of soft synergies in human manipulation, led to the design of a new generation of robotic and prosthetic hands, and contributed to establishing the new field of “soft manipulation”. In 2017 he ran an ERC Proof of Concept project to explore the applicability of advanced soft robotics solutions to prosthetics. The ERC Synergy project “Natural BionicS”, starting in 2019, will produce the first completely integrated bionic limb system with direct spinal interfacing.
Antonio Bicchi has organized and co-chaired the First WorldHaptics Conference (2005), starting the major series of gatherings of haptic researchers worldwide. In 2016, as the Founding Editor in Chief, he launched a new IEEE Journal, the Robotics and Automation Letters, which in only two years became the major scientific publication in the field.
Antonio Bicchi is the recipient of several awards and honors. He is a Fellow of IEEE since 2005, and has received the prestigious IEEE Saridis Leadership Award in 2018.

My talk will present some of our attempts to i) understand how humans skilfully interact with their environment, and ii) endow robots with similarly successful control behaviours. Twenty years ago, we discovered how humans constantly adapt their muscle activations to identify and adapt to the dynamic environment they are working with. I will first present this discovery and how it led to novel adaptive control behaviours for robots, which will enable them to interact with rigid and soft environments, with perspective in fields such as manufacturing and medical robotics. In recent years, we studied how humans physically interact with each other, e.g. during physical neurorehabilitation after a stroke or while dancing. By examining the behaviours of individuals when their right hands are physically connected, we could show how haptic information enables humans to estimate partners’ motor plan and use it to improve one own performance. Embodied as a robot partner, this model was verified as it induced the same improvements in motor performance as a human partner. These results elucidate the haptic communication taking place between physically interacting humans and promise collaborative robot systems with human-like assistance.

Related publications:
– E Burdet, DW Franklin and TE Milner (2013), Human Robotics – neuromechanics and motor control. MIT Press,
– Y Li, G Ganesh, N Jarrassé, S Haddadin, A Albu-Schaeffer and E Burdet (2018), Force, impedance, and trajectory learning for contact tooling and haptic identification. IEEE Transactions on Robotics 34(5): 1170-82.
– A Takagi, G Ganesh, T Yoshioka, M Kawato and E Burdet (2017), Physically interacting individuals estimate the partner’s goal to enhance their movements. Nature Human Behaviour 1(3): 54.
– Y Li, G Carboni, F Gonzalez, D Campolo and E Burdet (2019), Differential game theory for versatile physical human–robot interaction. Nature Machine Intelligence 1(1): 36.

Volker Dietz, neurologist, is the former Head of the Spinal Cord Injury Centre and of the Chair for Paraplegiology at the University of Zürich. His research is focused on the physiological basis of motor control and movement disorders in stroke and spinal cord injury. It was associated with fellowships in the National Institute for Neurology, Queen Square, London and in the Institute of the Problems of Information Transmission of the Academy of Sciences, Moskow His main achievements were: 1. to create the European network of paraplegic centers (EMSCI; 2. the translation of Nogo-antibodies in the clinical application (phase I, with Martin Schwab and the Novartis company); and, 3. the establishment of neurorehabilitation technology (development of the assistive device ‘Lokomat’ with G Colombo; spin-off company ‘Hocoma’). Dr. Dietz published more than three hundred original papers, edited 4 Handbooks, received highly recognized honors and awards. As emeritus Professor he continues his research at the University Hospital Balgrist in Zürich towards the neural basis of functional movements with the aim to develop of new training approaches, such as locomotor and functional hand training for patients with stroke.

Dr. José del R. Millán is a professor and holds the Carol Cockrell Curran Chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a professor in the Department of Neurology of the Dell Medical School.
He received a PhD in computer science from the Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, in 1992. Previously, he was a research scientist at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission in Ispra (Italy) and a senior researcher at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny (Switzerland). He has also been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Berkeley and Stanford as well as at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley. Most recently, he was Defitech Foundation Chair in Brain-Machine Interface at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland (EPFL), where he helped establish the Center for Neuroprosthetics
Dr. Millán has made several seminal contributions to the field of brain-machine interfaces (BMI), especially based on electroencephalogram signals. Most of his achievements revolve around the design of brain-controlled robots. He has received several recognitions for these seminal and pioneering achievements, notably the IEEE-SMC Nobert Wiener Award in 2011 and elevation to IEEE Fellow in 2017. In addition to his work on the fundamentals of BMI and design of neuroprosthetics, Dr. Millán is prioritizing the translation of BMI to end-users suffering from motor and cognitive disabilities. In parallel, he is designing BMI technology to offer new interaction modalities for able-bodied people.

Christoph Guger, PhD, studied biomedical engineering at the University of Technology Graz, Austria and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA. He then carried out research work at the Department of Medical Informatics (Prof. Pfurtscheller) at the University of Technology Graz and received his PhD degree in 1999. The topic of his PhD work was the design of an EEG-based brain-computer interface. This was the first real-time BCI system with continuous feedback. He also developed the real-time analysis with common spatial patterns, which is still the fastest and most accurate approach for oscillatory BCIs, and also developed a P300 BCI with very high accuracy and speed. In recent years, he also worked with ALS and stroke patients in different countries. He co-founded g.tec medical engineering GmbH in 1999, and has worked there ever since. Recently, Christoph Guger was awarded the internationally recognized EY Entrepreneur Award.

Dr. Marco Molinari (Neurologist, Physical medicine and rehabilitation specialist, PhD in Neuroscience) is the Director of Neurorehabilitation Translational Researchand Clinic at IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Rome. The Department integrates Neuroscience research and clinical neurological rehabilitation units. The clinical ward is devoted to rehabilitation of patients with brain or spinal cord lesions in a multidisciplinary environment. Research activity span from basic science approaches in animal models to development and testing of new rehab approaches in humans. Dr. Molinari is author of over 150 articles published on indexed journals. SCOPUS H-index 45. He is Review Editor of The Cerebellum. Research activity has been always focused on brain plasticity mechanisms and functional recovery both at basic science and clinical levels.

Professor Natalie Mrachacz-Kersting received her PhD in Biomedical Science and Engineering from The University of Aalborg, Denmark in 2005 and held several post-doc positions at the University of Auckland, New Zealand and Aalborg University, Denmark. From 2007 she was Associate Professor at the Center for Sensory-Motor Interaction, Aalborg University, until she moved to the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Dortmund, Germany as Full Professor in Neuroscience and Medical Technologies. Her research focuses on neurorehabilitation technology, and neural control of movement. Within these areas, she has (co)-authored approximately 70 papers in peer-reviewed Journals and >150 conference abstracts and papers. She was the recipient of the International Award in Brain-Computer-Interfaces in 2017 and has received several prestigious grants from the Innovation Fond of Denmark, Kong Christian den Tiendes Fond, Lundbeck Fond and the Obel Family Foundation of Denmark. She is currently Associate-Editor of several journals including Brain-Computer-Interfaces, the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports and Brain-Computer Interfaces – specialty section of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

James L. Patton received BS degrees in mechanical engineering and engineering science from the University of Michigan in 1989, MS degree in theoretical mechanics from Michigan State, in 1993, and the PhD degree in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University in 19 98. He is Professor of Bioengineering at University of Illinois at Chicago, and a senior research scientist at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. He worked in automotive manufacturing and in nuclear medicine before discovering the control of human movement. His general interests involve robotic teaching, dynamic balance control, haptics, modeling of the human – machine interface, and robot – facilitated recovery from a brain injury. Patton is vice president /conferences in the IEEE – EMB society, and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, and IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics. He’s also Chair of the 2019 ICORR conference .