Panel #1

PANEL - JUNE 17, 2026

XR and Artificial Intelligence are becoming key enabling technologies for the future of healthcare, with applications ranging from early diagnosis and clinical decision support to rehabilitation, patient monitoring, medical training, and personalised care. Their convergence with digital humans, wearable technologies, intelligent interfaces, and digital therapeutics opens new opportunities for immersive, data-driven, and human-centred healthcare systems. The panel will discuss how XR and AI can support clinicians, patients, and caregivers through more predictive, personalized, and proactive healthcare services. It will also address the main challenges that must be overcome for responsible adoption, including explainability, clinical validation, privacy, bias, regulatory issues, and trustworthiness. Bringing together perspectives from artificial intelligence, extended reality, biomedical applications, human–computer interaction, and clinical innovation, the panel aims to explore how AI and immersive technologies can contribute to the next generation of healthcare while keeping human expertise and ethical responsibility at the centre.

Claudio De Stefano

University of Cassino, Italy

Francesco Fontanella

University of Cassino, Italy

Giorgio De Nunzio

University of Salento, Italy

Oscar Mayora

Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy

Claudio De Stefano is currently a Full Professor of Computer Science at the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering of the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Italy. He has been invited as a visiting professor to many international research centers and, over the years, has participated as a speaker in relevant international conferences and has authored over 180 publications in international journals and congress proceedings. He joined the Program Committees of many international conferences on image analysis, pattern recognition, handwriting analysis and recognition, and served as chairman of international conferences. He also co-edited books as proceedings of international conferences and special issues of international journals. Since 2017, he has been the President of the International Graphonomics Society (IGS). He is Associate Editor of the journals Pattern Recognition Letters, Frontiers in Neuroinformatics, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Big Data and Cognitive Computing journal. The scientific interests of Claudio De Stefano include Artificial Vision, Image Processing, Pattern Recognition, and Evolutionary Computation. In particular, he has been active in document analysis and recognition, machine learning, and classification systems based on both convolutional neural networks and statistical learning paradigms. His current research interests include classifier combination paradigms, handwriting analysis, and multimodal learning systems applied to the early detection of cognitive disorders.

Francesco Fontanella is currently an associate professor at the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering of the University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Italy. His main research interests involve Machine Learning, Data Science, Complex Systems, and Evolutionary Computation. He applies the results of his research to develop applications that address real-life problems. These problems include detecting and predicting neurodegenerative and Developmental diseases through handwriting analysis, writer identification in ancient manuscripts, and water pollution detection. He co-authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and contributed to several research projects. He is actively involved in organising workshops at some of the top conferences in the field of computational intelligence. He also regularly serves as a guest editor and as an editorial board member of several international scientific journals.

Giorgio De Nunzio graduated in Physics from the University of Salento (Lecce, Italy) in 1991 and obtained a PhD from the University of Montpellier II in 1995. Since 2001, he has been working in the field of Applied Physics at the Department of Mathematics and Physics “Ennio De Giorgi” of the University of Salento. His research focuses on the application of Physics and Computer Science to Medicine, including diagnostic imaging and Artificial Intelligence, as well as to Cultural Heritage. He has co-authored approximately 120 peer-reviewed publications indexed in Scopus, covering topics such as AI-based methods for diagnosis and prognosis in oncology and other medical domains, together with the application of Physics and Computer Science to Cultural Heritage. He is the head of the Laboratory of Biomedical Physics and Environment at the University of Salento and coordinates the ADAM group (http://adam.unisalento.it). He has also contributed to several funded research projects and serves as a reviewer, guest editor, and editorial board member for international scientific journals.

Oscar Mayora obtained his Ph.D. in Electronic Engineering and Informatics from DIBE, University of Genoa, Italy, in 2000. In the same year, he joined the Advanced Interactive Systems Laboratory at VTT Electronics in Oulu, Finland, as an ERCIM Visiting Research Fellow. In August 2001, he was appointed Associate Professor of Computer Science at Tecnológico de Monterrey, where he later became head of the Graduate Program in Computer Science. From 2004 to 2016, Dr. Mayora led the Mobile & Ubiquitous Technologies Group at Create-Net, Italy. Since 2017, he has been the head of the Digital Health Research Unit at the FBK Center for Health and Wellbeing, as well as an adjunct professor at the University of Trento, the University of Verona, and the University of Applied Sciences FH-Burgenland in Austria. He is a senior member of the ACM and SIG-CHI, and served as the former president of ACM SIG-CHI for Mexico. Dr. Mayora has served as General Chair for various international conferences (including INTETAIN, CLIHC, and Pervasive Health) and is a founder and permanent member of the steering committees for the Pervasive Health Conference and the Latin American Conference on HCI. With over 150 publications in international conferences and journals, he has also served as Guest Editor for special issues in journals such as IEEE Intelligent Systems, EURASIP Signal Processing, Springer MONET, and the IMIA Journal on Methods of Information in Medicine, focusing on Pervasive Healthcare. Dr. Mayora has coordinated numerous national and international research projects (including FP6 and FP7 programs). His work primarily focuses on pervasive healthcare and assistive technologies; notably, he has coordinated projects under different funding instruments and programs such as FP6, FP7, H2020, Horizon Europe among others.