Prof. Robert Calandra has held the professorship for Explainable Artificial Intelligence at the Faculty of Computer Science since 2023 and works at the Cluster of Excellence "Centre for Tactile Internet with Human-in-the-Loop" (CeTI). One of his research areas is the question of s how to provide robots with the sense of touch. .

He can look back on a successful, international academic career at the University of California, TU Darmstadt, Aalto-University in Finland and the Università degli studi di Palermo in Italy. Previously, he founded at Meta AI (formerly Facebook AI Research) the Robotic Lab in Menlo Park. Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab. Among his contributions is the design and commercialization of DIGIT -- the first high-resolution compact tactile sensor commercially available, which is the most widely used tactile sensor in robotics. Roberto served as Program Chair for AISTATS 2020, as Guest Editor for the JMLR Special Issue on Bayesian Optimization, and has previously co-organized over 16 international workshops.

In his inaugural lecture, he discusses how robots can be made more practical in everyday life. On the way to making robots smarter and more useful for our society, he presents new touch sensing capabilities and better AI algorithms.

The get-together after the inaugural lecture will provide an opportunity to meet the newly appointed professor in person.

Further information and link to the livestream: https://tu-dresden.de/exzellenz/uwil