Seminar at MIT CSAIL

TALK: Wednesday 04-29-2015 CSAIL Colloquium: Social Inclusion via Augmented Senses: from academia to society

CSAIL  Colloquium: Social Inclusion via Augmented Senses: from academia to society
Speaker: Laura Giarré, DEIM,
Speaker Affiliation: Università di Palermo, In.sight Palermo, Andrea Bocelli Foundation

Date: Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Time:  4:00 PM to 5:00 PM

Location: 32-D463

Abstract:
How much the empowerment of people with specific needs can benefit from innovative technological solutions? Is there a future for assistive technology devices outside the Academic Laboratories? What are the step to design a system that can be easily accepted by the blind communities?  A Case Study: the Arianna Project – a Smartphone-based Navigation System.
Biography:
Prof. Laura Giarré is an engineer and a professor, working at the University of Palermo, School of Engineering, Palermo Italy. She  teaches Control Systems  and Identification and data  analysis. Her research interests are primarily in Networked systems. She is also a blogger, a writer and a poet. Laura Giarré received the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering from the Università di Firenze, Florence, Italy and the Ph.D. degree in System Engineering from the Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy, in 1986 and 1992, respectively. She has held visiting positions  the University of California at Santa Barbara (1999 and 2006) and visited LIDS, MIT, for short periods  multiple time, since 1999. She was Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Torino, Turin, Italy and since 1998 she has been Associate Professor at the Università di Palermo, Palermo, Italy. She has served as Associate Editor of Systems and Control Letters, (1999-2012) and IEEE Transaction on Automatic Control (2012-2015). In 2010 she was vice-chair of SING6, chair of the Challenges ABF MIT Workshop in 2013, and  General Char of MED’14, in 2014. She is member of the Advisory Board of the Andrea Bocelli Foundation and the Scientific Coordinator of the ABF Challenges Program. Since 2011, she has developed a strong interest in assistive technology She is the co-founder and CEO of In.sight.

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