Organizers
Paloma de la Puente
Affiliation: Universidad Polité cnica de Madrid (UPM)
Email address: paloma.delapuente@upm.es
Paloma de la Puente obtained her engineering degree in Automatic Control and Electronics
in November 2007 and her Ph.D. in Robotics and Automation in December 2012, both from
Universidad Politecnica de Madrid (UPM).
She had a research stay as pre-doctoral visitor at Caltech. After finishing her PhD she was
a post- doctoral researcher at DISAM-UPM and at ACIN Institute of Automation and Control-Vienna
University of Technology. She also had professional experience at Ixion Industry and Aerospace
and she is currently Assistant Professor at UPM.
Her main research interests are related to navigation, mapping, spatial cognition, sensor
data processing, human-robot interaction for service robotics and systems engineering. She
has participated in several national and European projects and also in international robotics
competitions.
Regarding service robotics, she has wide experience on robotics for museums and trade fairs,
robotics in search and rescue applications, robotics for surveillance and logistics and
assistive robotics for elderly users at their own homes.
Alberto Brunete
Affiliation: Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM)
Email address: alberto.brunete@upm.es
Alberto Brunete received his M.S. degree in Telecommunication Engineering and his
Ph.D. degree in Robotics and Automation from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
(UPM) (Spain) in 2000 and 2010, respectively. He is currently teaching at the Escuela
Técnica Superior de Ingeniería y Diseño Industrial (ETSIDI-UPM), and researching as
a member of the Center for Automation and Robotics (CAR UPM-CSIC).
He has done several research stages in Norway (NTNU, 2000), USA (University of Hawaii,
2002), Switzerland (EPFL, 2005) and United Arab Emirates (New York University Abu
Dhabi, 2012).
His main research activities are related to robotics and smart environments (ambient intelligence
and ambient assisted living), where he has worked on several national and European R&D projects as
Researcher and Project Manager in the ICT and Robotics fields: Sauvim, Microtub, Spot, Micromult,
Pisa, Thofu, Siglas, LabXXI, Hephestos, RoboHealth. He is especially interested in the Internet of
Things and the new possibilities it can bring to home automation. He has published more than 20
papers in related journals and conferences.
In the past, he has been Technical Manager at the Research Center for Smart Buildings and Energy
Efficiency (CeDInt-UPM) and Visiting Professor in the Department of System Engineering and Automation
at the Carlos III University (Spain), where he has started a Building Automation Lab.
In this field he has worked for the SME AtelMedia, leading the home automation department, where he
has acquired a deep knowledge of the situation of home and building automation in Spain. He has also
worked for the Spanish SME AMETIC as an R&D Consultant.
From January 2012 he has been collaborating with the Fundaci&oactue;n Alzheimer España as an advisor in
ICT affaires, and as a coordinator of the working group on home automation for Alzheimer patients
"DomAlz". The goal of this research is to use IoT to lower the caregiver's burden and facilitate as
much as possible Alzheimer patient's life at home. In 2016 he has won the price "ABC Solidario 2016"
for a project about a fall detection system for elderly homes.
Markus Vincze
Affiliation: Technical University of Vienna (TUW)
Email address: vincze@acin.tuwien.ac.at
Markus founded the V4R group in 1996 with the intention to make robots see. We are still working to improve robot perception. Markus received his diploma in mechanical engineering from Technical University Wien (TUW) in 1988 and a M.Sc. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA, 1990. He finished his PhD at TUW in 1993. With a grant from the Austrian Academy of Sciences he worked at HelpMate Robotics Inc. and at the Vision Laboratory of Gregory Hager at Yale University. In 2004, he obtained his habilitation in robotics. Presently he leads the "Vision for Robotics" laboratory at TUW with the vision to make robots see. V4R regularly coordinates EU (e.g., ActIPret, robots@home, HOBBIT, Squirrel) and national research projects (e.g, vision@home) and contributes to research (e.g., CogX, STRANDS, ALOOF ) and innovation proejcts (e.g., Redux, FloBot). With Gregory Hager he edited a book on Robust Vision for IEEE and is (co-)author of 42 peer reviewed journal articles and over 300 reviewed other publications. He was the program chair of ICRA 2013 in Karlsruhe and will organise HRI 2017 in Vienna together with Astrid Weiss and Manfred Tscheligi. Markus' special interests are cognitive computer vision techniques for robotics solutions situated in real-world environments and especially homes.