Organisers
Micol Spitale
Assistant Professor, DEIB, Politecnico di Milano - Visiting Affiliated Researcher, Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge
Email: micol.spitale@polimi.it
Short bio: Micol Spitale is an Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Milano and a Visiting Affiliated Researcher at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on Social Robotics, aiming to develop robots that are socio-emotionally adaptive and provide coaching for promoting wellbeing. During her Ph.D., she collaborated with IBM Italy and EIT Digital, spending time at the University of Southern California's Interaction Lab as a visiting Ph.D. student. Micol has published extensively in top conferences and journals, accumulating over 1100 citations (h-index=11). She has been involved in European projects and EPSRC UK-funded projects, receiving the EPSRC IAA Impact Grant for Early Career Researchers (25KGBP) while in Cambridge.
Maria Teresa Parreira
PhD Student at the Information Science Department at Cornell University
Email: mb2554@cornell.edu
Short bio: Maria Teresa Parreira is a 2nd year PhD student at the Information Science Department at Cornell University, supervised by Professors Wendy Ju and Malte Jung. Her work focuses on leveraging social awareness in robots through machine learning and affective computing. Previously, she was a research engineer with Prof. Iolanda Leite, at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Her background is in Biomedical Engineering (MSc's and BSc's) at Instituto Superior Tecnico, where she was awarded with the Maria de Lourdes Pintassilgo award for stand-out academical performance, and Best Thesis award for her collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University.
Maia Stiber
PhD Student at Johns Hopkins University, USA
Email: mstiber@jhu.edu
Short bio: Maia Stiber is a PhD student in the Intuitive Computing Lab at Johns Hopkins University advised by Professors Chien-Ming Huang and Russell Taylor. Her research focuses on understanding and modeling implicit behavioral responses to robot actions to allow the robot to detect robot errors. She has been awarded the JHU Computer Science Department Fellowship and the Jay D. Samstag Engineering Fellowship.
Chien-Ming Huang
Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University, USA
Email: chienming.huang@jhu.edu
Short bio: Chien-Ming Huang is the John C. Malone Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on designing interactive AI aimed to assist and collaborate with people. His research has received media coverage from MIT Technology Review, Tech Insider, and Science Nation. Huang completed his postdoctoral training at Yale University and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award.
Wendy Ju
Associate Professor of Information Science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech
Email: wendyju@cornell.edu
Short bio: Wendy Ju is an Associate Professor of Information Science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and inaugural faculty in Cornell’s new multi-college Design Tech department. Prof. Ju has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. In her research, Prof. Ju has worked closely with industrial partners such as Toyota, Spotify, Intel, Ford, Bosch, Renault, Fiat Chrysler, Panasonic, Volvo, Nissan and Mitsubishi. She has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, and a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015.
Malte Jung
Associate Professor in Information Science at Cornell University
Email: maltejung@cornell.edu
Short bio: Malte Jung is an Associate Professor in Information Science at Cornell University and the Nancy H. ’62 and Philip M. ’62 Young Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow. His research brings together approaches from design and behavioral science to build understanding about how we can build robots that function better in group and team settings. His work has received several awards including an NSF CAREER award. He holds a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, and a PhD Minor in Psychology from Stanford University. Prior to joining Cornell, Malte Jung completed a postdoc at the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization at Stanford University. He holds a Diploma in Mechanical Engineering from the Technical University of Munich.
Hatice Gunes
Full Professor of Affective Intelligence & Robotics at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Email: hatice.gunes@cl.cam.ac.uk
Short bio: Hatice Gunes is a Full Professor of Affective Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology. She is a former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC) and was a Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute – UK’s national centre for data science and artificial intelligence. Directing the Cambridge Affective Intelligence and Robotics Lab (AFAR Lab), Prof Gunes spearheads research on multimodal, social, and affective intelligence for AI systems, particularly embodied agents and robots, by cross-fertilizing research in the fields of Machine Learning, Affective Computing, Social Signal Processing, and Human Nonverbal Behaviour Understanding that resulted in >175 papers (H-index=39, citations > 8,400).