Valeria Villani is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sciences and Methods for Engineering of the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from the Uni- versity Campus Bio-Medico of Rome in 2006 and 2009, respectively, and her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering from the University Campus Bio-Medico of Rome in 2013, focusing on biomedical signal processing, with emphasis on ECG signals. She was the recipient of the Best Paper Award at ISABEL 2011 and the Mortara Fellowship at CinC 2014.
Her research interests focus on the analysis of human factors in human- system interaction and the design of human-centred user interfaces for efficient cooperation between the human and industrial machines or robots. Moreover, she has solid background in biomedical signal processing, which she has been applying to robot control and affective human-robot interaction. She was the Technical Coordinator of the H2020 European project “Smart and adaptive interfaces for INCLUSIVE work environment” (INCLUSIVE, GA n. 723373). She was also part of the Management Team of the project and coordinated interactions among project partners and with the European Commission, facilitating a smooth progress of project activities. Moreover, she was the Technical Coordinator of the experiment “COllaborative robot aMPLifying and Extending huMAN capabiliTies” (COMPLEMANT), which was part of the H2020 European project “Smart integrated Robotics system for SMEs controlled by Internet of Things based on dynamic manufacturing processes” (HORSE, GA n. 680734). She is co-PI of the project “Frailty status in hospitalized persons: artificial intelligence-based detection and technology-assisted home-based empowerment” (ART.I.DE.), funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. She is currently Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering and has been appointed as Associate Editor for the IEEE international conferences IROS in 2023 and ICRA since 2018. Moreover, she served as Guest Editor for the Special Issue on Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrial Applications of Mechatronics (Elsevier) in 2018. She was also a member of the Program Committee of IFAC HMS 2019 and co-organized several workshops at international conferences. In 2019 she was General Chair for the 12th International Workshop on Human-Friendly Robotics (HFR 2019).
She was reviewer for the project “Credible & Safe Robot Systems” (Cre- dRoS) funded to JOANNEUM RESEARCH ROBOTICS by the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology. Moreover, she was appointed expert evaluator by the European Commission for project proposals in the call HORIZON-CL4-2023-HUMAN-01-CNECT.