Keynotes


Prof. Francesco Renna

Title: Recent challenges in cardiovascular disease screening via digital auscultation

Bio:

Francesco Renna received the Laurea Specialistica degree in telecommunication engineering and the Ph.D. degree in information engineering, both from the University of Padova, Padova, Italy, in 2006 and 2011, respectively. Between 2007 and 2019, he held Visiting Researcher and Postdoctoral appointments with Infineon Technology AG, Princeton University, Georgia Institute of Technology (Lorraine Campus), Supelec, Instituto de Telecomunicações, Duke University, University College London, and University of Cambridge. Since 2017, he has been an Invited Assistant Professor at the University of Porto, Portugal. Since 2019, he has been a research collaborator with INESC TEC, Porto, Portugal.
His research interests include high-dimensional information processing and biomedical signal and image processing. Dr. Renna was the recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship from the European Commission and a Research Contract from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology.

Abstract:

Several regions of developing countries have difficulties in diagnosing and treating both congenital and acquired heart conditions. This is mainly due to the lack of infrastructure and cardiology specialists in geographically large areas and difficulty in accessing health services.
A non-invasive assessment of the mechanical function of the heart, performed at point-of-care settings, can provide early information regarding congenital and acquired heart diseases. In particular, cardiac auscultation and the analysis of the phonocardiogram (PCG) can unveil fundamental clinical information regarding heart malfunctioning by detecting abnormal sound waves in the PCG signal. In this talk, we will explore recent advances in the analysis of cardiac auscultation data. In particular, we will review the transformative impact carried out by deep learning architectures in extracting key clinical findings from heart sounds. Future new directions in multimodal methods to assess the electromechanical activity of the heart will be also presented.

Prof. Pasquale Daponte

Title: UAV METROLOGY: CURRENT APPLICATIONS AND OPEN CHALLANGES

Bio:

PASQUALE DAPONTE was born in Minori (SA), Italy, on March 7, 1957. He obtained his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree “cum laude” in Electrical Engineering in 1981 from University of Naples, Italy. He is a Full Professor of Electronic Measurements at University of Sannio – Benevento. He is Immediate Past Chair of the Italian Association on Electrical and Electronic Measurements, and Past President of IMEKO. He is member of: Working Group of the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technical Committee N°10 Subcommittee of the Waveform Measurements and Analysis Committee, IMEKO Technical Committee TC-4 “Measurements of Electrical Quantities”, Editorial Board of Measurement Journal, Acta IMEKO and of Sensors. He is Associate Editor of IET Science  Measurement & Technology Journal.

He is member of the Board of Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) Naples Charter.  He has organised some national or international meetings in the field of Electronic Measurements and European co-operation.

Abstract:

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming popular as carrier for several sensors and measurement systems, due to their low weight, small size, low cost and easy handling, which make them flexible and suitable in many measurement applications, mainly when the quantity to be measured is spread over a wide area or it lies in human hostile environments.

However, the drone itself can interact with both the measurand and the sensors, thus influencing the measurement results. For this reason, the drone equipped with the sensors must be thought as a measurement platform and must be characterized as a whole.

The keynote will introduce the architecture of the drone, by highlighting its subsystems and the parameters that can influence the on board sensors and measurement systems. Then, an overview of the sensors and measurement systems that can be embedded on the drone will be given, by presenting their operating principle and applications. Finally, some measurement applications will be described. For such applications, the measurement chain is analyzed and the influence of the flight parameters is taken into account to assess the measurement uncertainty.

Tiago Guerreiro


Vice-Director at LASIGE Research Unit
Assistant Professor at Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa
Group Leader at Tech & People Lab

Title: Designing Inclusive Technologies that Promote Collaboration, Playfulness, and Self-Efficacy

Abstract: When we hear people talking about accessibility, it is common to observe an attempt to put a band-aid on a problem. Accessibility as an after-thought not only creates interactive systems that are not accessible from the beginning but also leads to “accessible” systems that are superficial and no longer fit the purpose they were intended for. In these cases, people with disabilities tend to be presented with sub-optimal systems that limit their interactive experience. In this keynote, I will talk about our engagements with communities of people with disabilities to create interactive experiences that are playful, collaborative, and promote self-efficacy, in the contexts of inclusive learning, inclusive gaming, and human-robot interaction. This includes presenting research projects we have been working on in the last few years but also the different methodologies applied to get a deeper understanding of the communities we collaborate with, and the impact of our own interventions.

Short bio: Tiago Guerreiro is a Professor at Universidade de Lisboa (Faculdade de Ciências) and a researcher at LASIGE. His main areas of expertise are Pervasive Healthcare, Mobile, and Accessible Computing. In these areas, he published 100+ peer-reviewed papers, and received awards for 10+ papers and an ACM Best of Computing award in 2016. He is Editor-in-Chief for ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, was the Web for All General and Program Chair, in 2016 and 2015, respectively, and was ASSETS 2020 General Chair, among many other service roles. He was an invited expert supporting the European Commission in implementing the Web Accessibility Directive. He is the President of his institution’s Ethics Review Board, Vice-Director and past coordinator of LASIGE’s research line on Accessibility and Aging, and Coordinator of the Data Science Master at FCUL.