Biography

Andrea Bonarini (Milano, 1957). Laurea (Master) in Electronics Engineering (Computer Engineering area), 1984. PhD in Computer Engineering in 1989 from Politecnico di Milano. Master in Neuro-Linguistic Programming in 1993, from IIPNL.
He is full professor and Chair of the PhD Program in Information Technology at Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering.
Since 1990 he is coordinating the AI and Robotics Lab at Politecnico di Milano (AIRLab http://www.deib.polimi.it/eng/deib-labs/details/21).
He has been nominated Fellow of the Alta Scuola Politecnica (http://www.asp-poli.it) in 2012. He is among the founders of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA) and the Italian Regional Interest Group of the IEEE Neural Network Council, now Italian Chapter of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (Chair from 2008 to 2010). He has been from 2003 to 2006 coordinator of the Working Group on Robotics of the AI*IA. He participated since 1997 to the Robocup initiative (member of the Executive Committee from 2002 to 2010 (www.robocup.org)).
He is currently in charge of "Informatics", "Artificial Intelligence", “Robotics and Design”, and "Soft Computing" courses at the Politecnico di Milano. He has given and gives courses about "Uncertainty", "Fuzzy Logic", "Soft Computing" and "Designing Interaction" within the PhD program of Politecnico. He has tutored more than 150 Laurea (Master) Theses, some ERASMUS Theses, Alta Scuola Politecnica theses, and 12 PhD Theses in the AI, Machine Learning, and Robotics fields.
He has participated and leaded several EU, national, and industrial projects. Since 1989, he has realized with his collaborators and students more than 50 autonomous robots, of which one awarded the Kazuo Tamie International Award in 2016.
His research interests are focusing on human-robot interaction, but still include Intelligent Data Interpretation, Autonomous Robotic Agents (in particular Edutainment, Entertainment and Robogames), Affective Computing, Reinforcement Learning, and Fuzzy Systems. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers on international journals, books, and proceedings of international congresses.
In 2015, he co-founded the NovaLabs start-up (www.novalabs.io), a company based on the results of research developed with PhD students in collaboration with ST Microelectronics, i.e., a HW/SW system to implement the electronics and basic control part of professional, autonomous, robots and devices in 1-2 days.