Organizers and Senior Advisory Board

 Leena Mathur (Organizer) is a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Her research interests are in multimodal machine learning, commonsense reasoning, and social intelligence in virtual and embodied AI systems. Her research has been recognized by a best paper honorable mention award at ICMI 2020, and her work has been published at ICMI, ACII, ICASSP, FG, Interspeech, and AAAI. She completed undergraduate degrees in computer science, cognitive science, and linguistics at the University of Southern California.

 Dong Won (Don) Lee (Organizer) is a MS/PhD student at MIT in the Personal Robots Group. He is interested in developing socially-intelligent embodied AI agents that can interpret and respond to human communicative behaviors. He has expertise in multimodal machine learning, human behavior modeling, and human-robot interaction. His research has been published at CVPR, ECCV, EMNLP and ICMI. He completed his master’s and undergraduate degrees in Machine Learning at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and has previously organized a workshop on Crossmodal Social Animation at ICCV 2021. 

Dr Micol Spitale (Organizer) is a PostDoctoral Researcher at the Affective Intelligence & Robotics Laboratory (AFAR Lab), Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, UK under the supervision of Prof. Hatice Gunes. Her research is in social robotics, affective computing, child-robot interaction, and machine learning for  human behavioural analysis. Her current research focuses on developing socio-emotionally adaptive robots that can foster wellbeing through coaching and psychologically-proven interventions.

Dr. Cynthia Breazeal (Organizer and Senior Advisory Board) is a Professor at MIT, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots Group at the Media Lab. She is a pioneer of social robotics and world-renowned expert in human-robot interaction; her seminal book, "Designing Sociable Robots", is recognized as a landmark in launching the field of Social Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction. Her research group actively investigates social robots applied to education, pediatrics, health and wellness, and aging. Her group also develops design justice frameworks for human-robot interaction and inclusive AI literacy education. She also serves as MIT dean for digital learning and Director of the MIT Initiative on Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education. She co-founded the consumer social robotics company, Jibo, Inc., where she served as Chief Scientist and Chief Experience Officer. Breazeal received her doctorate in 2000 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

Dr. Louis-Philippe Morency (Senior Advisory Board) is a Leonardo Associate Professor at CMU's Language Technologies Institute, where he leads the Multimodal Communication and Machine Learning Laboratory (MultiComp Lab). He was formerly research faculty at the University of Southern California. He is a world-renowned scientist in multimodal machine learning. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2006. His research focuses on building the computational foundations to enable computers with the abilities to analyze, recognize and predict human communicative behaviors during social interactions. His research has been recognized by 10 best paper awards at IEEE and ACM conferences. He is chair of the advisory committee for ACM ICMI and associate editor at IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.