Stefano Tortora

Stefano Tortora is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova.

 

He obtained a M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 2017, and he received a PhD in Information Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2021. He then pursued two years of postdoctoral research at the Intelligent Autonomous System laboratory, the University of Padova, Italy. He is currently Assistant Professor at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova, since 2023. He spent 10 months as “visiting student” at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, and 7 months as “visiting researcher” at the Campus Biotech (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) in Gèneve, in 2016 and 2019 respectively.

 

The research activity of Stefano Tortora has been strongly characterized by a commitment to the emerging field of Neurorobotics. In particular, he has focused on its interdisciplinary engineering and neuroscientific aspects. His research has been passionately dedicated to improving the interaction between users and robotic devices by creating a new paradigm in human-machine interfacing (HMI) fusing multimodal information coming from wearable sensors and robot’s sensors. During the Ph.D. activity, Stefano Tortora worked on the development of hybrid human-machine interfaces (h-HMI) to decode movement intention from wearable sensors. In 2020, Stefano Tortora was among the first researchers in developing recurrent neural networks for gait decoding from electroencephalography data. He proposed and implemented novel probabilistic approaches combining brain and muscular activity to ensure a more reliable control of robotic devices.

 

Currently, his work concerns the integration of these h-HMI with shared-autonomy algorithms for the development of intelligent assistive devices aimed at enhancing the mobility of people with motor impairments. On these topics, Stefano Tortora is currently involved as research fellow in the PNRR PE8 “Age-IT – Ageing Well in an Ageing Society” project (https://ageit.eu/wp/), responsible for the analysis of multimodal EEG-EMG data for the control of a lower limb exoskeleton and other assistive robotic devices via machine learning and deep learning. Additionally, his project on the development of an intelligent lower limb exoskeleton has been recently founded within the PNRR PE1 “FAIR – Future Artificial Intelligence Research” initiative (https://fondazione-fair.it/cascade-calls/).

 

Stefano Tortora is Associate Editor for the European Journal on Artificial Intelligence, Guest Associated Editor and Review Editor for the journal “Frontiers in Neurorobotics”, and Guest Associated Editor for the journal “MDPI Applied Sciences” in the section on “Robotics and Automation”. He is also Publication Chair for the IEEE European Conference on Mobile Robots 2025 (https://ecmr2025.dei.unipd.it/). Since 2021, he is in charge of the course “Sistemi di elaborazione 1” at the Department of Statistical Sciences, and of the course of “Python Programming for Data Science and Engineering” within the Doctoral School of Information Engineering (University of Padova) and the National Doctorate in Robotics and Intelligent Machines (DRIM).

 

Stefano Tortora is one of the Team Managers of the WHi Team and Whi Students Team (University of Padova), participating at the Cybathlon BCI race since 2019. With his teams, Stefano Tortora won 2 gold medals, 1 silver medal and 1 bronze medal in the various Cybathlon editions, and received the BCI Jury Award for the most promising technology at the last Cybathlon 2024 in Zurich.

Morten Gram Pedersen

Morten Gram Pedersen is Associate Professor in Bioengineering at the Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova.

 

He leads the unit for Modeling of Cell Biology. He holds a PhD in Mathematical Biology from the Technical University of Denmark, and has obtained independent funding for several postdoc positions, including a EU Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowships with Lund University Diabetes Centre, Malmö, Sweden.

 

He is the author of more than 50 papers on peer-reviewed journals (or which 8 as single author, 17 as first author; 30 as corresponding author). Besides collaborations with researchers from several departments of the University of Padova (Depts. Biomedical Sciences, Physics, Medicine, Mathematics), among others, he collaborates with experimental and theoretical researchers at Oxford University, UK; Uppsala University, Sweden; University of Exeter, UK; National Institutes of Health, MD, USA; Florida State University, FL, USA.

 

His main interests are mathematical modeling and theoretical analysis of:

  • local, intracellular calcium dynamics
  • local control of calcium-dependent potassium channels
  • protein and calcium dynamics evoking exocytosis of secretory vesicles
  • electrical activity in neuro-endocrine cells
  • clusters of electrically coupled cells

Giovanni Sparacino

Giovanni Sparacino is currently Full Professor at the Dept. of Information Engineering in Padova.

 

He received the MSc (summa cum laude) in Electronics Engineering from the University of Padova in 1992 and the PhD in Bioengineering from the Polytechnic of Milan in 1996.

From 1997 to 1998 he was Research Engineer at the Department of Audiology and Phoniatrics of the University of Padova. Then, he joined the Department of Information Engineering as Assistant Professor of Bioengineering. Since 2005 he is Associate Professor at the same department, where he is presently in charge of teaching “Medical Informatics” and “Biological Data Analysis”. At present, he is Full Professor at the University of Padua.

 

Since 2004 he is member of the Board of Professors of the “PhD School in Information Engineering”. Since 2012 he is coordinator of the “Bioengineering” track of the PhD School and, since 2015, he is the School Vice-director. During the academic year 2016/17, he served as Vice-Head of the department.

 

His scientific expertise includes modeling, deconvolution and parameter estimation techniques for the study of physiological systems, algorithms for continuous glucose monitoring sensors (calibration, denoising and prediction), methods for linear and nonlinear analysis of biomedical signals (fNIRS, EEG, local field potentials, event-related potentials, BCI).

He authored more than 90 regular papers appeared in WoS/Scopus –indexed international journals (Scopus H-index is 24, with 1964 citations) and 7 patents. More information on http://www.dei.unipd.it/~gianni

 

Contacts:
Prof. Giovanni Sparacino
Department of Information Engineering – University of Padova
Via Gradenigo 6/B
35131 Padova

Phone: +39 049 827 7741
Fax: +39 049 827 7699
e-mail: gianni@dei.unipd.it

Luca Tonin

Luca Tonin is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova.

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Emanuele Menegatti

Emanuele Menegatti is Full Professor of the School of Engineering at Dept. of Information Engineering of University of Padova since 2017.

 

After his graduation in Physics in 1998, he received his MsC in AI & Robotics from the University of Edinburgh (UK) in 2000. Menegatti received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2003 from Univ. of Padua. In 2005 he became Assistant Professor and Associate Professor in 2010.

 

Menegatti’s main research interests are in the field of Robot Perception. In particular, he is working on neurorobotics, RGB-D people tracking for camera network, and service robotics.

 

Menegatti is Associated Editor of the journals: “Robotics and Autonomous Systems” (Elsevier), “IPSJ Transactions on Computer Vision and Applications” (Springer), “Frontiers in Neurorobotics” (Frontiers), “International Journal of Advanced Robotic System” (Sage). He has served as Associated Editor for IEEE ICRA Conference and IEEE IROS Conference and IJCAI Conference.

 

He is teaching master courses on “Intelligent Robotics”, “Three-dimensional data processing” and bachelor course in “Computer Architecture” and a course for school teachers on “Educational Robotics”.

 

He was coordinator of the FP7 FoF-EU project “Thermobot” and local principal investigator for the European Projects “3DComplete”, “FibreMap” in FP7; “Focus”, “eCraft2Learn” and “SPIRIT” in H2020. Menegatti also served as Project Reviewer for the European Commission in FP7 and H2020.

 

He was general chair of the 13th International Conference “Intelligent Autonomous System” IAS-13 and was program chair of IAS-14 and IAS-15. He is author of more than 50 publications in international journals and more than 120 publications in international conferences.

 

In 2005, Menegatti founded IT+Robotics, a spin-off company of the University of Padua, active in the field of industrial robot vision, machine vision for quality inspection, automatic off-line robot programming. In 2014, he founded EXiMotion a startup company active in the field of educational robotics and service robotics.

Alessandra Bertoldo

Alessandra Bertoldo is Full Professor of Bioengineering at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova. 

 

Her research interests are mainly related to the development of mathematical models for analysis and control of biological systems and to the quantification of functional positron emission tomography and magnetic resonance images. Current personal and collaborative research activities include: Mathematical models for quantitative PET studies, Methods for magnetic resonance functional imaging, Imaging genetics, Non-linear mixed effects modeling, Quantitative multimodal imaging.

 

During her career, she has contributed to several national as well as international research projects. She teaches Imaging for Neuroscience for the Bioengineering Master’s Degree Program at the University of Padova. From 2015, she also teaches Statistical Methods for Bioengineering (Bachelor’s Degree Program in Information Engineering at the University of Padova).

She is the Referent of the Master’s Degree Program in Bioengineering and of the Bachelor’s Degree Program in Biomedical Engineering.

She is member of the board of the Doctoral School on Neuroscience of the Padova Neuroscience Center of the University of Padova.

Since November 2015, she is member of the IEEE-EMBC Technical Committee on Biomedical Imaging and Image Processing.

Since May 2016 she is member of the Board of Directors of the Padova Neuroscience Center, University of Padova. Since March 2017, she is vice-director of the Padova Neuroscience Center of the University of Padova.

In August 2022, she was appointed Director of the Padova Neuroscience Center, University of Padova.

 

Scopus: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=6603190822

Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alessandra_Bertoldo

Google scholar: https://scholar.google.it/citations?user=m0GuxsoAAAAJ&hl=en

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