Episode #11: Robotics and Human-Machine interaction

ASEF Podcast

Is the Metaverse a potential stepping stone for robotics and human-machine interaction? Does gamification enhance rehabilitation outcomes? Will we be able to build a comprehensive human-person digital twin for health purposes? How will Digital Twins and robotics change the manufacturing industry? What are the opportunities for Slovenia in this field? What is needed to build an ecosystem among industry and universities similar to the existing ones in the US? Can Slovenia become a test environment for self-driving cars?
In Episode 11, we talk with ASEF professors Miloš Žefran, Vesna Novak, and Mitja Trkov. Listen as they discuss robotics and human-machine interaction.

• Miloš Žefran is an Electrical and Computer Engineering professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he also received an M.S. in Electrical Engineering. He received an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1995 and 1996, respectively. From 1997 to 1999, he was a National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. He was on the faculty at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and held a visiting position at the University of Pisa, Italy. Dr. Žefran received an NSF Career Award in 2001 and has been continuously supported by the NSF since then. His main research areas involve Human-Robot Interaction, assistive robots, cyber-physical systems, autonomous vehicles, runtime monitoring, and switched systems.
• Vesna Novak is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Cincinnati. She received her diploma and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Ljubljana in 2008 and 2011, respectively. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Sensory-Motor Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, from 2012 to 2014, and then an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Wyoming from 2014 to 2021. Her research interests include rehabilitation robotics, wearable robotics, virtual reality, serious games, affective computing, and human activity recognition.
• Mitja Trkov is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Henry M. Rowan College of Engineering at Rowan University. He obtained his Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, in 2016. He received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2007. Before his graduate studies, he worked as an R&D engineer in the naval industry. Before joining Rowan University, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT. His main research areas involve wearable and assistive devices, human-machine interactions, soft robotics, mechatronics, rehabilitation, and biomedical engineering, ergonomics, and biomechanics.

The ASEF Podcast host is Tanja Janko, a Master's Student of Chemistry at the University of Zurich. She was an ASEF Fellow in 2019 with Dr. Dimitri Krainc at Northwestern University.