Between the 13th and 17th of April 2026, we organized the TRAIL PhD conference alongside the SWEET spring school in Catania, Sicily.

Monday and Tuesday were reserved for the spring school, with many keynote speakers and tutorials. You can find more information here.

On Wednesday, the 15th of April, the TRAIL DCs organized two Hands-on Sessions for the attendees of the spring school. Tamara Bila, Yanis Diallo, Sergio Lanza, and Theodor Wulff gave an introduction to Mechanistic Interpretability, with a challenge for the students to complete. Tamlin Love, Ferran Gebellí, and Pradip Pramanick introduced their newly developed framework, HEXAR, for hierarchical robot explanations.

On Thursday, the 16th of April, the 1st day of the conference began at 9:30 with a Welcome session held by Coordinator Stefan Wermter, and the two General Chairs of the TRAIL conference, Julia Gachot and Tamlin Love.

The first keynote speaker of the day, Angelo Cangelosi (University of Manchester), presented his work on "Cognitive and Developmental Robotics: The Importance of Starting Small", with a specific focus on large language models. The second keynote was held by Thomas Weisswange (HONDA-RI) on the topic of "Modeling Intended Impact of Assistive Interactions" in automotion.

The afternoon saw two Paper Sessions of Explainability Methods for Robotics and Social Robotics: Applications for Navigation and Interactions, chaired by Tien Pham and Hariharan Arunachalam. In parallel to the last paper session, we had the TRAIL Supervisory Board and Management Meeting.

On the 2nd day of the TRAIL conference, Friday, the 17th of April, we had the third keynote by Alessandra Sciutti (IIT), titled "Toward Understandable Robots through Human-Inspired Cognition". Alessandra gave an overview of her impressive work on Human-Robot Interaction and the future research directions of her research group. 

Afterward, we had two Papers Sessions on Multimodal Frameworks for Social Robotics and Trustworthiness and Failure Recognition in Robotic Scenarios, chaired by Sergio Lanza and Ferran Gebellí.

We wrapped up the conference with final remarks from the TRAIL DCs and a small ceremony in which the coordinator presented them with a token of appreciation.