Discovering new technologies: the RETIS laboratory of the Scuola Sant'Anna participated in the Robotics Festival for students in Pomarance

The Teatro dei Coraggiosi hosted the tenth edition of the 2024 Robotics Festival. This event on technology, aimed at students in Pomarance, was organised and directed by Antonio Quarta, a teacher at the Pomarance ITIS who is passionate about robotics and who has conceived and curated this event since its first edition in 2015.
The ReTiS Lab TeCIP Institute (Technologies of Communication, Informatics, Photonics) of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna has always provided a significant contribution to the scientific organisation of the event, identifying topics of interest and speakers with great popularising skills. For the tenth edition, the opening of the proceedings was entrusted to the mayor of the municipality of Pomarance, followed by a series of speeches that ranged from the evolution of artificial intelligence to future developments in autonomous driving.

Giorgio Buttazzo and  Alessandro Biondi, professors in Information Processing Systems at the Scuola Sant'Anna, gave an interesting overview of the history and future prospects of artificial intelligence. Federico Nesti, research fellow at the RETIS laboratory, showed the students some examples of modern autonomous driving algorithms. Lastly, Edoardo Cittadini, a PhD student at the same lab, showed some live demonstrators to give the boys and girls a better understanding of the potential of neural networks for analysing images in real time applied to the automatic recognition of manual gestures and the tracking of people using drones.

The event was closed by Lorenzo Cominelli, a technologist at the Enrico Piaggio Centre of the Department of Information Engineering at the University of Pisa, who presented ABEL, a new type of robot specially designed to interact with humans through both verbal and emotional communication.