Organisers

Maia Stiber (Johns Hopkins University, USA) 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.

Micol Spitale (University of Cambridge, UK) is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at the Politecnico di Milano (Polimi), as well as a Visiting Affiliated Researcher at the University of Cambridge. Previously, she was a PostDoctoral Researcher at the Affective Intelligence & Robotics Laboratory (AFAR Lab) of the University of Cambridge. In October 2021, she successfully achieved her Ph.D. (in Information Technology, Computer Science and Engineering Area) from Politecnico di Milano, with "cum laude" honours. During her Ph.D., she also spent several months as a visiting Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California (USC) in the Interaction Lab. She is a member of the ELLIS Society.

Hatice Gunes (University of Cambridge, UK) is an internationally recognized scholar and a Full Professor of Affective Intelligence and Robotics at the University of Cambridge. She is a former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing and was a Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute – UK’s national centre for data science and artificial intelligence. She obtained her PhD in computer science from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia as an awardee of the Australian Government International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) - a prestigious scholarship awarded on the basis of academic merit and research capacity. As a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London, she played a crucial role in the EU SEMAINE project, that created the world's first publicly available multimodal, fully autonomous, and real-time human-agent interaction system ( the SAL system). Attentive to user affect and nonverbal expressions, the project developed novel nonverbal audiovisual human behaviour analysis and multimodal agent behaviour synthesis capabilities, and won the Best Demo Award at IEEE ACII’09. Now directing the Affective Intelligence and Robotics Lab (AFAR Lab) at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, 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. Honoured with prestigious funding, including a 5-year EPSRC Fellowship (2019-present) and the EU Horizon 2020 Grant (2019-2022), she has been leading the AFAR team in establishing new collaborations with experienced wellbeing professionals as well as the Department of Psychiatry, which earned them the RSJ/KROS Distinguished Interdisciplinary Research Award Finalist at IEEE RO-MAN’21, and exploring ambitious horizons ranging from using robots for mental wellbeing assessment in children — with over 1,000 global media reports and an interview with The Guardian — to taking the robotic wellbeing coaches from the lab to the workplace, attracting over 700 media coverages. These collaborative research efforts were recently honoured with the Runner-up for the Collaboration Award at the 2023 University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor's Awards for Research Impact and Engagement. The AFAR team's ongoing efforts in mitigating bias in affective and wellbeing computing also earned them the Best Paper Award in Responsible Affective Computing at ACII 2023.

Chien-Ming Huang (Johns Hopkins University, USA) 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.