Human-centric Technology for the Future

FoReLab (Future-Oriented REsearch LABoratory) develops technologies and methodologies for paving the way to a new generation of industry,  autonomous, sustainable, resilient and person-centered.

FoReLab is a project of the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Pisa, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education under the programme "Dipartimenti di Eccellenza".

Sketches from the future

Human-Machine Social and Emotional Interaction 

Personality influences human behaviour during social interactions as well as is influenced by the situation in which these interactions take place. The reciprocal interplay between personality and the situation has to be investigated in modelling personality for social robots.  We focus on a bottom-up approach by detailing the core components of the system and by posing particular emphasis on its link with induced emotions. Our work approaches social robot personality focusing on increasing the human-likeness of the model, rather than improving the imitation of human behaviours, to improve the believability and the user experience of social human-robot interactions.

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Sketches from the future

Human-centered Trustworthy AI

People’s trust on a technology strongly relies on understanding how it works and to achieve this objective requires significant basic research, in particular on the development of algorithms for learning explainable models, also through distributed and privacy-preserving approaches carried out, for instance, through federated learning.

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Sketches from the future

Human-Robot Integration and Human-Machine Teaming

Advances in the field of robotics is enabling the development of machines with increased computational intelligence, exploiting their embodied “physical" intelligence. Inspired by neuroscientific models of human behavior in interaction with the physical world, the new robots can safely touch humans and physically act in the environment. The fusion of different technologies, together with deeper understanding of how to interface humans and machines, is enabling a new relationship between humans and robots, that is much more of an integration than an interaction in the classical sense.

Human-machine collaboration ranges from interactions between a single human and a single machine to complex multi-agent systems involving multiple humans and multiple machines. The success of such interactions depends on the ability of humans and machines to communicate effectively and work together seamlessly. Human-Machine Teaming is an exciting and rapidly evolving field that has the potential to revolutionise many aspects of our lives. 

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Sketches from the future

Modeling human intelligence by wearable sensors and systems

Understanding how humans interact with each other and the environment, as well as how they perceive themselves, is the basis for the development of a new human centric approach: the next generation technologies and solutions will allow to empower humans taking into account their peculiarities. This shift in the design approach will be based on new models of human cognition and behaviour that will be developed merging the multiparametric information about human action, as well as physiological and affective states. To achieve this goal, minimally invasive, robust, efficient, cheap,and sustainable wearable devices have to be designed. The research about such devices, both for sensing and mediating human-human and human-machine interaction, will explore new materials, production processes and designs. Noticeably, personalization in the device design, as for instance taking into account morphological and also behavioural aspects, will be crucial for improving both usability and data reliability.

Sketches from the future

Pervasive Networks

Future networks demand for an end-to-end co-design of communication, sensing, and computing functionalities, aiming at endowing networks with the native ability to "perceive" the physical world. In a conventional information processing pipeline, environmental information is collected by sensors (perception layer), exchanged via communications (transport layer), and fused by processing units (computing/application layer). Perceive networks aim to seamlessly integrate these three layers into a self-sustaining, intelligent network, virtually interacting with every aspect of our daily lives.

Sketches from the future

2D printable electronics

In the not-too-distant future, we may perhaps be able to print ourselves an iPad or a smartphone, using a simple inkjet printer and a sheet of paper. 
Two-dimensional materials are thin as few atoms, and they have shown unpreceeded electrical, optical and mechanical properties, never observed at the same time in  any other materials. Being ultimately thin, they represent the best choice for flexible, portable and wearable applications, opening the path towards the realization  of complex electronic systems, which can be applied in several applications such as Internet of Things (IoT), biomedical and anticounterfeating applications.