Speakers

Confirmed invited Keynote:

Professor Toshie Takahashi

Wasada University (JP)

Toshie Takahashi is a Professor at Waseda University, Japan, and an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge. She has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford, the Harvard University, and Columbia University. Her research focuses on the social impact of AI and robotics, human-centered AI, AI ethics and governance, and the future of human–robot interaction in an AI-driven world. She has led international projects including “A Future with AI: Voices of Global Youth” in collaboration with the United Nations, and the GenZAI project under Japan’s Moonshot R&D Program.

Professor Takahashi serves as Chair of a study group under Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), where she explores human-centered futures in the digital age. She has delivered keynote and invited talks at major global forums including the United Nations, The Economist, and Google. Her work introduces the concept of Human-First Innovation, emphasizing the design and governance of AI systems that support human dignity, agency, and self-creation in an increasingly AI-driven society. For more information, see: https://toshietakahashi.com

Confirmed invited panellists:

Assistant Prof. Ilaria Torre

Chalmers University of Technology (SE)

Ilaria Torre is an Assistant Professor in Human-Robot Interaction at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, where she received a prestigious Wallenberg Academy Fellowship in 2025. Her research centers around improving communication between humans and robots. This includes both verbal (e.g. designing appropriate voices for robots) and nonverbal (e.g. designing legible behaviours to communicate information intuitively and effectively without language) communication. She is also interested in questions revolving around ethics and sustainability, for example using robotics to reduce gender stereotypes in society, and understanding the tricky relationship between environmental costs and social benefits when deploying social robots. Before joining Chalmers, she was a postdoctoral researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, after obtaining her PhD from the University of Plymouth, UK, in 2017.

Don (Dong Won) Lee

MIT Media Lab (US)

Don (Dong Won) Lee is a final-year PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab in the Personal Robots Group, where he works on socially intelligent robots and multimodal AI systems for human–robot interaction. His research focuses on enabling robots to perceive, reason about, and respond to the social and physical context of real-world interactions, with particular interests in embodied communication using multimodal foundation models. His work includes developing and deploying interactive social robots, as well as creating datasets and benchmarks for evaluating social intelligence in AI systems.

Demetra Brady

Google DeepMind (UK)

Demetra Brady is a Research Strategist at Google DeepMind. Her work focuses on researching the societal implications of technology developed at Google DeepMind, specifically focusing on the Gemini Robotics project. She holds an MPhil in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Leeds.

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.

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