“Robotics and AI are impacting people’s lives more and more. Creating intelligent robots that are explainable, trustworthy, and reliable is essential.”

Elena Torta is a tenure track assistant professor in the Control Systems Technology group in the Mechanical Engineering department of the Eindhoven University of Technology. Her research focus is on autonomous robots, with emphasis on human-robot interaction and model-driven engineering. She is starting to explore machine learning applications for autonomous robots as well, such as learning from demonstration and reinforcement learning. This work is a return to the focus of Torta’s Ph.D. research, where she performed research in the domain of cognitive autonomous robots and human-robot interaction within the context of the EU-FP7 KSERA.

From 2014 to 2019, Torta honed her software development, software architecture, and leadership skills at ASML, a multinational company leader in the production of photolithography systems for the semiconductor industry, growing from a design engineer to a competence leader. In that role, she steered innovation at the company level in the field of algorithm deployment and model-based engineering and advised mechatronics and metrology projects on these topics. In these positions, Torta has built the engineering and development skills that she can now apply to her robotics research.

Elena Tortaholds a BSc degree in Computer Science and Automation Engineering from Università Politecnica delle Marche (Italy), followed by an MSc degree from the same institute in 2009. She did her master’s thesis research at the Technical University of Denmark. In 2010 she joined Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) as a Ph.D. student. After obtaining her Ph.D. degree cum laude in 2014, she joined ASML, where she progressed from design engineer to a software functional cluster architect (2017) and then to algorithm deployment (using Matlab) competence leader in 2018. In 2019 she joined TU/e as an assistant professor.

EAISI (assistant professor startup package)