{"id":256,"date":"2016-08-24T18:15:43","date_gmt":"2016-08-24T16:15:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/members.loria.fr\/SIvaldi\/?page_id=256"},"modified":"2026-01-11T23:07:39","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T21:07:39","slug":"home","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/members.loria.fr\/SIvaldi\/","title":{"rendered":"About me"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a senior research scientist\/research director (directrice de recherche) in the Inria Center of the University of Lorraine (formerly Inria Nancy Grand-Est) and Loria, and head of the Human Centered Robotics Team (HUCEBOT)<\/a><\/strong>. \u00a0My research is currently focused on robots collaborating with humans. I am interested in combining machine learning with control to improve the prediction, adaptation, and interaction skills of robots. I strongly believe in user evaluation, i.e., making potential end-users evaluate our technologies, to improve usability, trust, and acceptance.<\/p>\n

When I joined Inria in 2014, I was one of the founding members of the team LARSEN<\/a>, directed by Francois Charpillet<\/a>. Before joining Inria, I was a postdoc in the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Lab<\/a> of TU Darmstadt (Germany), with Jan Peters<\/a>, and in the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics<\/a> (ISIR) in Paris (France), with Olivier Sigaud<\/a> and Vincent Padois<\/a>. I obtained my PhD at the Italian Institute of Technology<\/a> in Genoa (Italy) with Francesco Nori<\/a> and Giorgio Metta<\/a> in 2011. I defended my French Habilitation to Direct Research (HDR) in November 2022. In 2023 I was a visiting expert in the robotics lab at ESA \/ ESTEC.<\/p>\n

I am currently serving as Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics (2025-…). In the past, I served as the Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Social Robotics<\/a> (2021-2024), and as Associate Editor of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2017-2021), for which I received the IEEE RA-L Distinguished Service Award as Outstanding Associate Editor<\/a>. I was the Program Chair of IEEE-RAS Humanoids 2019<\/a> and\u00a0 IEEE ARSO 2023. I was the General Chair of IEEE-RAS HUMANOIDS 2024 –<\/a> co-located with the 1st euROBIN coopetition, which made together the International Robotics Week 2024 in Nancy.<\/p>\n

I served the GDR Robotique (the French Robotics Society) as co-lead of the GT7 Humanoid Robotics<\/a> (2021-2023); I have been serving IEEE RAS as co-chair of the ICRA Steering Committee (2022-2023)<\/a> , the Associate Vice-President of the IEEE RAS MAB<\/a> (2022-2025), and I am currently serving as a member of AdCOM of IEEE RAS<\/a> (2025-2028).<\/p>\n

I obtained the Suzanne Zivi Award 2020 for excellence in research and was nominated by Robohub and Women in Robotics in the list of “50 Women in Robotics you need to know about<\/a>” in 2021. I was one of the Judges of the ANA Avatar Xprize<\/a> competition where robots were teleoperated to be avatars!<\/p>\n

I am currently involved in the following projects:<\/p>\n