Foreword

Under the BioRob2012 umbrella, the first edition of the Symposium on Surgical Robotics is hosted in parallel with the first two days of the program. This is a single-track, focused symposium featuring presentations of invited talks, peer-reviewed contributions and posters in a very interactive style. An international PhD school (with 70+ participants from Italy, Japan, Korea and other countries), will run all along the week, in parallel with both the BioRob 2012 and the GNB 2012 conferences. Many other meetings, workshops, competitions and conferences will take place in this same period of time, generating a critical mass of events and presence of researchers, that is expected to attract a wide interest also from the media, and even from the general public.