Awards

The Dr. Mohammed Sallam, Post Doc Researcher at the medical laboratory of the PRISMA team, at the ICAROS center, received the first prize for best presentation at the twelfth edition of CRAS (Conference on New Technologies for Computer and Robot Assisted Surgery) with the paper "Towards a Robotic Surgical Needle Holder with Needle Rolling Capabilities".

Bruno Siciliano has been appointed Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association – AAIA, an academic, non-profit and non-governmental organization, whose mission is to promote the development and application of AI through academic research and scientific education .

The prof. Siciliano, full professor of automation and robotics at DIETI, Fellow of the scientific associations IEEE, ASME, IFAC, winner of the Engelberger Award for Education, obtains the prestigious nomination as "high-level scientist with outstanding results in the area of human-robot cooperation" .

Man-robot cooperation is a fundamental theme of his research, explored also thanks to the numerous European projects won at the helm of the PRISMA Lab. Among the first, PHRIENDS, for the development of key components of a new generation of robots designed to share the environment and physically interact. SAPHARI, for the study of all essential aspects of the safe and intuitive physical interaction between humans and robots. SHERPA, a ground and air robotic platform to support search and rescue activities in a hostile environment such as the Alpine scenario.

Projects that have paved the way for research lines such as aerial, assistive, cognitive, industrial, service robotics and have brought the team an average annual funding of 1.4 million euros over the last ten years.

The recognition of the AAIA to the professor Siciliano joins those already obtained by Leopoldo Angrisani, Antonio De Maio, Marco Lops and Carlo Sansone.

Below is the link to the news on the UniNa website: http://www.unina.it/-/42494547-bruno-siciliano-fellow-della-asia-pacific-artificial-intelligence-association

Dr. Munyque Mittelmann, post-doc at the DIETI ASTREA laboratory, directed by professor Aniello Murano, won the international award "The KR Early Career Award".

The prestigious award was presented to her on 6 September 2023 at the International Knowledge Reasoning Conference (KR 2023) which, this year, was held in Rhodes, Greece. The Knowledge Reasoning community deals with foundational aspects of computer science and in particular Artificial Intelligence. The most important works of the reference community are presented at the annual KR conference, a highly prestigious and selective conference, among the main ones in Computer Science and for this reason rated A*.

The motivations for the award are based on the highly significant work done by Dr. Mittelmann in the field of formal strategic reasoning, during the PhD and during the postdoc period. In practice, formal methods and logics for strategic reasoning were used for the first time to define, analyze and solve Mechanism Design problems, thanks to the synergy with the research work of prof. Murano. In fact, a particular mention was attributed to the use of Strategy Logic, a formalism developed by Professor Aniello Murano, in collaboration with several students and colleagues, which has been attracting enormous attention from the artificial intelligence community for over a decade.

Dr. Mittelmann obtained her PhD from the University of Toulouse in 2022 obtaining the prize from the French National Artificial Intelligence Association AIFA as the best thesis of the year 2022 (https://afia.asso.fr/les- prix-de-these-en-intelligence-artificielle/). Throughout the PhD period, Dr. Mittelmann worked in synergy with the ASTREA laboratory, also thanks to an internship carried out in the DIETI in the autumn of 2020. Since 1 October 2022, Dr. Mittelmann has been a post-doc researcher at the ASTREA laboratory, first at apply to the PRIN 2020 project of which the prof. Murano is the head of the research unit of the University and, from 1 August 2023, as part of a two-year research project H2020 Marie Curie, SEAL, which Dr. Mittelmann won together with prof. Murano (https://sites.google.com/view/mittelmann/seal).

The Research.com platform has published the 2023 ranking of the Best Universities and Leading Scientists and UniNA is listed as 227th in the world with 152 "Leading Scientists", of which 22 are DIETI Professors.