She works in Italy, at the Italian Institute of Technology (Iit), one of the 50 women of world robotics 2022, the only one in the ranking to come from an Italian working reality: she is the Polish Agnieszka Wykowska, who after winning the ERC funding in 2016 European Research Council, has moved to our country to carry out its projects, which study in particular the interactions between robots and humans.
The prestigious ranking
"50 women you need to know in the world of robotics", is drawn up every year, starting from 2013, by the non-profit organization Women in Robotics, and aims to be a source of inspiration for the new generations in an area that seems almost exclusively male prerogative.
Wykowska is head of the research group at IIT that deals with the social implications of human-machine interactions, is an associate professor of engineering psychology at the Swedish University of Technology in Luleå, guest lecturer at the English University of Manchester and editor-in-chief for the International Journal of Social Robotics.
Who is
Born in Poland, she graduated in psychology from the German Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, where she earned her doctorate, before becoming a researcher in the field of robotics.
In her work, Agnieszka Wykowska favors multidisciplinarity, with the aim of understanding the brain mechanisms that come into play when humans interact with robots.
In particular, at IIT she works with the humanoid robot iCub, which the researcher introduced for the first time in a clinical rehabilitation center to test its effectiveness in the treatment of children with autism spectrum disorders.
Recently, Wykowska and her group also worked on a new Turing test, which is a test to determine whether a machine is capable of exhibiting intelligent behavior.