Subgroup 02 | Study Design
Alessandra Rossi (co-chair)
| University of Naples Federico II (Italy) Website: https://alessandrarossi.net
Alessandra is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, working as part of Italian PON R&I 2014-2020 – REACT-EU. She was previously a postdoctoral researcher on the BRILLO project (PON I&C 2014-2020 MISE) at the University of Naples “Federico II”. Her PhD thesis was part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research ETN SECURE project (https://secure-robots.eu/) at the University of Hertfordshire (UK). She is also a Visiting Lecturer at University of Hertfordshire. She is very active in the scientific community both in the fields of robotics and human-robot interaction. Alessandra is also involved in the organization of the RoboCup Humanoid League, as Executive and Organising committee member, and RoboCup team “Bold Hearts” at the University of Hertfordshire since 2019. She is also co-organiser of the RoboCup Symposium 2023, Special Session chair at IEEE RO-MAN 2024, Publicity chair at ICSR 2023 conference, Publicity chair at IEEE RO-MAN 2023, Publicity chair at IEEE RO-MAN 2022, Virtual Organizing Chair of IEEE RO-MAN 2021, Registration Chair and Social Media Responsible of IEEE RO-MAN 2020. Her research interests include human–(multi) robot interaction, social robotics, trust, XAI, multi-agent systems, cognitive architecture and user profiling. In particular, her focus is to investigate and evaluate the factors affecting acceptance and trust of people in robots, including people’s mental models, personalities and disposition to trust others, and mechanisms for recovering from a loss of trust, including the ability of robots to adapt their behaviours to dynamic changes of people’s behaviours, environment and tasks.
Patrick Holthaus (co-chair)
| University of Hertfordshire (UK), Website: https://patrick.holthaus.info/
Patrick is a Senior Research Fellow in the Robotics Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire (UK). His research revolves around social robotics and focuses on nonverbal interactive signals, social credibility and trust in assistive and companion robots. He is further interested in interaction architectures and behaviour coordination as well as systems integration in heterogeneous environments. Patrick has extensive expertise in social human-robot interaction and experimentation and is highly skilled with a large array of robotic and sensing technologies. As manager of the Robot House, a unique facility for human-robot interaction, he brings together real-world applications and fundamental robotics research. Patrick coordinates all research activities inside Robot House, supports internal and external collaborators in using the facilities, and advises them while conducting research. He is also a supervisor of several PhD students and a Visiting Lecturer at the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science, teaching advanced research topics in computer science and other modules. Patrick is involved in the organisation of various international conferences and workshops as well as public scientific dissemination events. He has been general chair of UKRAS’21 and publication chair of HAI’17, the organiser of workshops at ICMI’16, HAI’17, and RO-MAN’18-22 and special sessions at RO-MAN’21-23. He is an associate editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics, Paladyn – Journal of Behavioral Robotics, and Interaction Studies, as well as associate topic editor for human-robot/machine interaction at the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems.
Gloria Beraldo
| National Research Council of Italy Website: https://www.istc.cnr.it/en/people/gloria-beraldo
Gloria Beraldo received the M.Sc. degree cum laude in computer science engineering and the Ph.D. in information engineering with Doctor Europaeus mention from the University of Padova, Padua, Italy, in 2017 and 2021, respectively. She was a visiting researcher at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in 2019 and at Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya under the TERRINet (European Robotics Research Infrastructures) initiative. She is currently a postdoc at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian National Research Council. She is involved in the SI-ROBOTICS (Social robotics for active and healthy ageing) project. She is also a contract professor at the University of Padova. Her research is focused on designing novel semi-autonomous human-robot interactions with particular attention to the case of brain–machine interface-driven robotics devices. She is investigating how to decode high-level user intention, for instance from his/her brain activity, through supervised machine learning techniques and fuse it with the perception of the robot to achieve advanced forms of human-robot interaction. Her research interests include human–robot interaction shared control and shared autonomy, telepresence robots, neurorobotics, socially assistive robotics, and intelligent systems.
Wing-Yue Geoffrey Louie
| Oakland University Website: https://www.geoffrey-louie.com/
Wing-Yue Geoffrey Louie is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oakland University where he is the director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. He recently received the prestigious NSF CAREER award for his research and educational efforts towards making robots accessible to individuals from all backgrounds and domain areas. The core theme of his research is the development of robot technology that can be easily customized by laypeople and personalized according to their individual needs. His research has been integrated for applications including therapy for autism spectrum disorder, older adult care, physiotherapy, early childhood education, search and rescue, and autonomous driving. His research work has led to over $3.5 million in funding from a range of federal, state, and industry sources including the National Science Foundation, US Department of Defense, NASA, Automotive Research Center at the University of Michigan, and Dura Automotive.
Emmanuel Senft
| Idiap Research Institute (CH) Website: https://emmanuel-senft.github.io/
Dr. Emmanuel Senft is a Research Scientist at the Idiap Research Institute in Martigny, Switzerland and a member of the Swiss Young Academy. He leads the Human-centered Robotics and AI group, which explores human-robot interaction and human-AI interaction from a technical side, but with a strong emphasis on user experience. He obtained his MSc from EPFL and his PhD from the University of Plymouth (UK) before working briefly in Japan at ATR and conducting a 3-year postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research consists of designing and deploying systems combining approaches from participatory design, end-user programming, robotics, and interactive machine learning. Applications domains contain education, therapies, manufacturing, and assistive robotics.
Frank Foerster
| University of Hertfordshire (UK) Website: https://frank-foerster.gitlab.io/
Frank is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire (UK), member of the Robotics Research Group, and affiliated with the Adaptive Systems Research Group. He obtained his MSc from Ulm University and his PhD from the University of Hertfordshire. Before becoming a Senior Lecturer, he conducted postdocs at the Multimedia and Vision (MMC) group at Queen Mary University, the Advanced Robotics Group (ARQ) at Queen Mary as well as a research fellowship at the Adaptive Systems Research Group. His research covers both human-robot interaction as well as cognitive and developmental robotics. Most of his research centres around speech-involving forms of human-robot interaction. In the case of developmental robotics, he uses robots as testbeds for theories on language acquisition originating from developmental psychology. During his PhD, he created the first robotic setup from which a humanoid robot acquired linguistics negation based on linguistically unconstrained human-robot interaction. In the more general case, he is working on rendering robotic speech interfaces more fluid and robust and is looking at ways to integrate multimodal repair into these. Most recently he organised the WTF workshop at CUI to evaluate future directions on how to go about conversational failures in the context of human-robot interaction.
Antonio Andriella
| Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (Spain) Website: www.antonioandriella.com
Antonio Andriella is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC) working on the Value-Aware Artificial Intelligence project that aims at developing AI systems that are able to understand and act by a value system and explain their own behaviour or understand the behaviour of others in terms of a value system. He was a Research Scientist at Pal Robotics, awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie cofund fellowship in the H2020 project PRO-CARED, which aimed at designing social robots with proactive personalised behaviour during long-lasting interactions (2022-2024). He obtained a PhD with a thesis titled “Personalizing robot assistance for cognitive training therapy” from the Institut de Robòtica i Informàtica Industrial (IRII) (2017-2022). His thesis received the prestigious Georges Giralt award for the best EU PhD thesis in Europe from euRobotics. Prior to his time at IRII, he held the position of Artificial Intelligence lead at Cogisen where he worked for 7 years (2009-2016). His main research interests are in the areas of human-robot interaction (HRI) and human-centered design technologies. His work focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating interactive social systems that can be personalised and that can adapt to their users over short-term and long-term interactions, based on individual’s unique needs and goals.
Giovanni Pilato
| National Research Council of Italy
Giovanni Pilato received his “summa cum laude” Laurea degree in electronic engineering (equivalent MSEE) and his Ph.D. degree in “Electronics, Telecommunications, and Computer Science” from the University of Palermo, Italy, in 1997 and 2001, respectively. Since 2001 he is staff research scientist at the CNR (Italian National Research Council). He is currently senior research scientist, and since 2019 he has been the Group Leader of the Cognitive Systems for Robotics research group at ICAR-CNR. Since 2001 he has also been an adjunct professor at the University of Palermo. He teaches Web Data Analytics within the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Palermo, Italy. His research interests include geometric techniques for knowledge representation, conceptual spaces, intelligent data analysis, social sensing, Social Sensing, and Cognitive Architectures for Social Robotics. In particular, his key research topics are on: 1. Social Robotics and human-robot interaction; 2. Affective computing, with a specific focus on emotion detection and emotional manifestations in robots; 3. Semantic computing for social sensing.
Daniel Hernandez Garcia
| Heriot-Watt University (UK) Website: https://dhgarcia.github.io/
Daniel Hernández García is a Research Fellow at the Interaction Lab, School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences, Heriot-Watt University. His research lies at the intersection of HRI and AI, with a focus on developing socially aware intelligent autonomous systems that can work with and for humans, particularly in assistive, collaborative or education scenarios. He works on the application of data-driven and deep learning approaches for deploying autonomous systems applications in real scenarios with human users.
Suresh Kumaar Jayaraman
| Carnegie Mellon University Website: https://jskumaar.github.io/
Suresh Kumaar Jayaraman is a postdoctoral researcher at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Michigan in 2018 and 2021, respectively, and his B.E. from Anna University, India, in 2013. He is broadly interested in developing trustworthy robots for human-robot teaming. His current research focuses on group human-robot interaction with an emphasis on explainability, communication, and trust among the group.
Daniel Tozadore
| École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Website: https://people.epfl.ch/daniel.tozadore
Currently a postdoc researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where he supervises PhD, master, and bachelor students and teaches Social Robotics courses to master and bachelor programmes. Is the leading PI of the iReCheck project from EPFL side, a joint project with Paris 8 University aiming to achieve an autonomous handwriting practising setup using tablets and social robots with real-time assessment and personalised recommendation. Has also a leading role in the starting joint project between EPFL (Switzerland) and PHBern to evaluate the impact of Social Robots in the inclusion of children with immigrant history in international schools, analysing the different users’ perceptions in the three countries. The project includes participatory designing with young students, teachers and families to better understand the impact of Social Robots in this context and to propose hardware, software and training solutions to promote and foster inclusion. Has experience in the training of teachers for Artificial Intelligence and Social Robots activities, where is his research focus now developing and coordinating research to implement tools and methods to empower the teachers in classroom and extra-classroom activities.
Jeremy Marvel
| U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Jeremy A. Marvel is a research scientist and project leader at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD. Dr. Marvel received the bachelor’s degree in computer science from Boston University, Boston, MA, the master’s degree in computer science from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, and the Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH. Prior to NIST, Dr. Marvel was a research scientist at the Institute for Research in Engineering and Applied Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. He joined the Intelligent Systems Division at NIST in 2012, and has over fifteen years of robotics research experience in industry, academia, and government. His research interests include intelligent and adaptive solutions for robot applications, with particular attention paid to human-robot and robot-robot collaborations, multi-robot coordination, industrial robot safety, machine learning, perception, and automated parameter optimization. Dr. Marvel currently leads a team of scientists and engineers in metrology efforts at NIST toward the performance evaluation of human-robot teams, and developing tools to enable small and medium-sized enterprises to effectively deploy robot solutions.
Aysegul Ucar
| Firat University in Elazig (Turkey)
Aysegul Ucar is a Professor of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Vision in the Mechatronics Engineering Department at Firat University in Elazig, Turkey. She leads the Robotics and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the same university. She is also a vice chair of the Computer Science Research Center between 2019-2021. She has more than 23 years of background in artificial intelligence, its engineering applications, teaching, and research.
Snehesh Shrestha
| UMD PhD Candidate/ NIST PREP Researcher (USA) Website: https://www.snehesh.com
Snehesh Shrestha is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland College Park. He works in the Perception and Robotics Group (PRG) lab in the Department of Computer Science under the guidance of Prof. Yiannis Aloimonos (CS), Dr. Cornelia Fermüller (UMAICS), Dr. Ge Gao (INFO), and Dr. Irina Muresanu (School of Music). His research is at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, human factors, arts, and culture. He is interested in multidisciplinary research aimed at building rich and intuitive experiences that ‘amplify human abilities, empowering people and ensuring human control.’ His recent work includes natural repair mechanisms in HRI and AI-empowered music education.
Paul Robinette
| University of Massachusetts Lowell (USA) Website: https://sites.uml.edu/paul-robinette/
Paul Robinette is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell (UML). He has performed extensive experiments on human-robot trust in time-critical situations in virtual simulations, the lab, and the field. In particular, he works to move experiments out of the lab and into the field, such as: in-situ human-robot teaming experiments in the marine domain and field experiments for river navigation of autonomous surface vehicles. These projects have yielded datasets that have been released for the human-robot interaction community and the marine robotics community. Recently, Dr. Robinette has been investigating the effects of value misalignment (e.g. moral trust violations) on human-robot interaction and potential ethical concerns as AI systems enter the real-world.
Curtis Gittens
| University of the West Indies