U.S. Semantic Technologies Symposium Series
Keynote Speaker Dr. Alessandro Oltramari
Decision Making in the Cyber-Physical World
Abstract
Recent advances in generative AI have enabled systems that can engage in fluid conversation, assist with writing, research, and problem-solving. However, when we move from purely digital domains to the cyber-physical world—where computation, sensing, and actuation meet—new challenges emerge. Human decision-making in such environments depends on a deep integration of perception, context, and embodied experience, while current AI systems remain largely detached from these physical dynamics. This gap becomes critical as we envision “cyber-physical AI” agents capable of supporting or autonomously managing processes in domains like manufacturing, robotics, and infrastructure management. This talk will examine why today’s AI systems struggle to align abstract reasoning with real-world interactions and will present ongoing efforts to build more grounded, adaptive agents for decision-making in cyber-physical environments.
Biography - Dr. Alessandro Oltramari
Alessandro Oltramari is President of the Carnegie Bosch Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and Senior Manager at Bosch Research Technology Center (RTC) in Pittsburgh (USA), where he leads the “Cyber-Physical AI & Reasoning” group. Alessandro’s expertise includes Neuro-Symbolic AI, Knowledge Engineering, Cognitive Architectures, Computational Linguistics. He joined Bosch Research in 2016, after working as a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. His primary research interest is to investigate how human cognition and knowledge can help machines make sense of the cyber-physical world. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Trento (Italy). He had a 10-year tenure at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council (ISTC-CNR); he was a Visiting Scholar at Princeton University, between 2005 and 2006, working on the WordNet lexical database. Alessandro’s esearch record lists about 100 publications. He received the Army Research Lab “Above and Beyond” award, received multiple “best paper” awards and has been featured in major news media outlets such as CNET and The New Scientist.