Prof. Hedvig Kjellstrøm

Hedvig Kjellström is a Professor in the Department of Robotics, Perception and Learning at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and also affiliated with Swedish e-Science Research Centre and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Germany. She received an MSc in Engineering Physics and a PhD in Computer Science from KTH in 1997 and 2001, respectively, and thereafter worked at the Swedish Defence Research Agency, before returning to a faculty position at KTH. Her present research focuses on methods for enabling artificial agents to interpret human and animal behavior. These ideas are applied in the study of human aesthetic bodily expressions such as in music and dance, modeling and interpreting human communicative behavior, and the understanding of animal behavior and experiences. In order to accomplish this, methods are developed for agents to perceive the world and build representations of it through vision.

Hedvig has received several prizes for her research, including the 2010 Koenderink Prize for fundamental contributions in computer vision. She has written around 150 papers in the fields of computer vision, machine learning, robotics, information fusion, cognitive science, speech, and human-computer interaction. She is mostly active within computer vision, where she is an Editor-in-Chief for CVIU, a Program Chair for CVPR 2025, and regularly serves as Area Chair for the major conferences.

Title of talk: "Building computer models of human cognition and behavior"

Abstract: In the last decade, development of deep-learning methods for reconstructing, tracking and synthesizing human motion and facial expression in video has come a long way, and this technology is quite mature and is used for personal video editing, gaming, visualization of football games and much more. Even more recently, there has also been an explosive development of large language models as we all know, and there is also a large research focus on models that analyze language and visual cues.

Building on this development, the work in my lab focuses on modeling the underlying mechanisms behind human non-verbal and verbal behavior, from a cognitive and behavioral perspective. In this talk, I will present a number of projects addressing this from different viewpoints, for conversational gesture synthesis, equine pain detection, and emotion-centered facial expression recognition

Prof. Konstantinos Alexis

Title of talk: "Resilient Autonomy through Multimodal Perception”

Prof. Dr. Kostas Alexis conducts research in the domain of resilient robotic autonomy. Through his studies he has examined the potential of autonomous systems to navigate extreme environments by presenting resourcefulness, robustness and redundancy. His research areas include the domains of robot control, path planning, and Simultaneous Localization And Mapping, while across these disciplines a holistic approach is taken to facilitate enhanced resilient as demonstrated through field robotics. He has been the PI in major international grants sucha s the DARPA Subterranean Challenge and his funding portfolio includes grants from US sources (e.g., DARPA, NSF, DOE, USDA), EU (e.g., Horizon 2020 programs), as well as the Norwegian Research Council.