Athanasios Papanikolaou is a PhD student at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, and is specifically employed in the EU Horizon 2020 project "AIFORS". He received his integrated master's degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Thessaly, Greece. He is currently conducting research in soft robotics and AI, specifically in projects such as hand gesture recognition and action segmentation for robot manipulation using multimodal data. He has co-authored three publications, and five more are pending for acceptance.