Elena Merlo

Elena Merlo was born on 25 August 1997 in Genoa (Italy). She received the BD in Biomedical Engineering and the MD in Robotics Engineering, both with full mark, by the University of Genoa (Italy) in 2019 and 2021, respectively. Her Master Thesis project, entitled "A Method for Dynamic Human-Robot Role Allocation based on Ergonomic Risk Prediction", was carried out at the Human-Robot Interfaces and Physical Interaction (HRI2) laboratory of Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT). Two intermediate versions of such a project, during its development, were accepted by I-RIM 2021 (in this case it was also selected as finalist for the Student Paper Award) and ICRA 2022 conferences. In March 2022, she started a period in HRI2 lab as a PhD Fellow Student. By November 2022, she became a PhD Student, and the research focus shifted to the representation and interpretation of human demonstrations for the automatic programming of robotic platforms. The objective of her PhD is to devise an intuitive and cost-effective programming technique, with a specific emphasis on empowering robots to acquire task knowledge by observing human demonstrations in RGB videos of manual tasks.