A message from the ECHORD coordinator Alois Knoll

Full professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Department of Electronics and Information. Since 1984 he is member of the Politecnico di Milano Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Project (PM-AI&R Project) and coordinator of the AIR Lab since 1990. He has participated to several EU projects, national projects, and industrial projects. He is among the founders of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence (AI*IA) and the Italian Chapter of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (present chair). He has been from 2003 to 2006 coordinator of the Working Group on Robotics of the AI*IA. He participates since 1997 to the Robocup initiative (member of the Executive Committee since 2003). Main research interests: soft computing, autonomous robots, behavior engineering, edutainment robotics, affective computing. He has published more than 130 papers on international journals and proceedings.