Carme Torras (www.iri.upc.edu/people/torras) is Research Professor at the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (CSIC-UPC) in Barcelona, where she leads a research group on assistive and collaborative robotics. She received M.Sc. degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Barcelona and the University of Massachusetts, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC).
Prof. Torras has published six research books and more than three hundred papers on robotics, machine learning, geometric reasoning, and neurocomputing. She has supervised 19 PhD theses and led 16 European projects, the latest being her ERC Advanced Grant project CLOTHILDE – Cloth manipulation learning from demonstrations.
Prof. Torras is IEEE and EurAI Fellow, member of Academia Europaea and the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona. She has served as Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and Associate Vice-President for Publications of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
Currently, she is Vice-President of CSIC Ethics Committee, and a member of the Spanish Advisory Committee for AI.
Convinced that science fiction can help promote ethics in robotics and AI, one of her novels - winner of the Pedrolo and Ictineu awards - has been translated into English with the title The Vestigial Heart (MIT Press, 2018) and published together with online materials to teach a course on ‘Ethics in Social Robotics and AI’, which are being used in several universities worldwide.