Dr. Alessandra Sciutti is the head of the CONTACT (COgNiTive Architecture for Collaborative Technologies) Unit of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT).

After a master’s degree in Bioengineering from the University of Genova and a Ph.D. in Humanoid Technologies, she spent two research periods abroad, first at the Robotics Lab of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (USA) and then at the Emergent Robotics Laboratory of Osaka University (Japan). In 2018 she was awarded an ERC Starting Grant, for the project wHiSPER (www.whisperproject.eu), focused on the investigation of shared perception between humans and robots. She published more than 100 papers in international journals and conferences and is currently Associate Editor for several journals on Cognitive Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction. She is the corresponding co-chair of the Technical Committee on Cognitive Robotics of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society and a Scholar of the ELLIS Society. Sciutti received many awards, such as the title “Tecnovisionarie” (2021) and a recognition by Fortune Italy (2022) for her research in Robotics and AI. The scientific aim of her research is to investigate the sensory, motor, and cognitive mechanisms underlying human social interaction, with the technological goal of developing robots able to establish mutual understanding with humans.