Keynote talk #1
Title: Architecting Cognitive Resonance: Toward Robots That Understand and Are Understood
Date: Wednesday, 18th November 2026
Time: 09:30 – 10:30
Room: Sale d’Actes
Abstract
Despite advances in robotics and AI, robots still struggle to understand humans and make themselves understood. Effective collaboration calls for cognitive resonance: compatibility between how humans and robots perceive, interpret, and anticipate one another. Human cognition is embodied, predictive, and shaped through development and social interaction. We infer intentions and internal states from subtle non-verbal cues, while continuously adapting our behavior to others. In this keynote, I will discuss how these principles can guide the design of bio-inspired cognitive architectures integrating perception, action, memory, motivation, and prospection. Drawing on examples from our research, I will show how such architectures can enable robots to interpret human behavior, express their own intentions through intuitive actions, and adapt to different partners over time. Building these systems also offers a synthetic approach to investigating the mechanisms underlying human social cognition. Ultimately, the goal is not to make robots more human-like, but to develop cognitive systems capable of establishing and sustaining mutual understanding with humans.
Speaker
Dr. Alessandra Sciutti
Cognitive Architecture for Collaborative Technologies Unit
Italian Institute of Technology
Alessandra Sciutti is a Senior Tenure Track Researcher and head of the CONTACT (COgNiTive Architecture for Collaborative Technologies) Unit of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT). She received her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Bioengineering and her Ph.D. in Humanoid Technologies from the University of Genova in 2010. After two research periods in the USA and Japan, in 2018, she was awarded the ERC Starting Grant wHiSPER (www.whisperproject.eu), focused on the investigation of joint perception between humans and robots. She has published more than 100 papers and abstracts in international journals and conferences, coordinates the ERC POC Project ARIEL (Assessing Children Manipulation and Exploration Skills), and has participated in the coordination of the CODEFROR European IRSES project (https://www.codefror.eu/). She is currently Chief Editor of the HRI Section of Frontiers in Robotics and AI and Associate Editor for several journals, including the International Journal of Social Robotics and Cognitive System Research. She is an ELLIS scholar and the corresponding co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee for Cognitive Robotics. Her research aims to investigate the sensory and motor mechanisms underlying mutual understanding in human-human and human-robot interaction.