Organising Committee

Alva Markelius

University of Cambridge (UK)

Alva is a PhD candidate at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge researching adaptive interaction frameworks for marginalised populations in foundation-model-driven social robotics. She is also recipient of Top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ award 2024 and committee chair of the Centre for Human Inspired AI Early Career Community. She also holds an MSt degree in AI Ethics & Society at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.

Laetitia Tanqueray

Lund University (SE)

Laetitia Tanqueray is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Technology and Society, at Lund University, Sweden. Laetitia holds law degrees in English, Welsh and French Law (LLB and Master 1 respectively) and a Master's (MSc) in Sociology of Law. She investigates human-robot interactions (HRI) from a socio-legal lens in the context of health care. Her published work has mostly focused on informing HRI design, including in collaboration with HRI experts in the context of peripartum depression and informal caregivers.

Demetra Brady

Google DeepMind (UK)

Demetra Brady is an AI Ethics & Safety Manager at Google DeepMind. Her work focuses on supporting considerations around the societal implications of the technology developed at Google DeepMind, with a focus on large language models, robotics foundation models, and vision-language models for agentic applications. She holds an MPhil in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Leeds. She previously also held a position as a Student Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge.

Dr. Eric Nichols

Honda Research Institute (JP)

Eric Nichols is Principal Scientist at Honda Research Institute Japan, where he leads research on LLM-driven communication and expressive behavior for Haru, a social robot designed to support children's well-being and social-emotional development. His work is informed by deployments in pediatric hospitals and schools across the world, with a focus on safe and ethical child-robot interaction. The Haru project has been recognized by UNICEF and the United Nations.

Associate Professor Stefan Larsson

Lund University (SE)

Stefan Larsson is an Associate Professor in Technology and Social Change at Lund University, Sweden. As a lawyer and socio-legal researcher he leads a research group on AI and Society, focusing on social and normative implications of AI and adaptive technologies in both private and public domains, ranging from public sector decision-making to mammography screening and social robotics.

Professor Hatice Gunes

University of Cambridge (UK)

Hatice Gunes is a Full Professor of Affective Intelligence and Robotics & Director of the AFAR Lab at University of Cambridge. She spearheads award-winning research on multimodal, social, and affective intelligence for AI systems, particularly embodied agents and robots, by cross-fertilizing research in Machine Learning, Affective Computing and Nonverbal Behaviour Understanding. Prof Gunes has been named among the “World's Top 2% Scientists” by Stanford University in Elsevier for 5 consecutive years. She has also been awarded a prestigious EPSRC Fellowship to investigate adaptive robotic EQ for wellbeing and named a Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute.

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