Organising Committee

Rebecca Stower (ESR 1) (r.stower@jacobs-university.de) - Google Scholar - ResearchGate - ORCID - twitter - twitter@psy4bots
Rebecca Stower is completing her PhD program at Jacobs University Bremen and is currently a visiting researcher at the Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique at Sorbonne Université. She has a Bachelor of Psychological Science (Honours First Class) from the University of Queensland, Australia (2016). Her thesis centres on the conceptualisation and measurement of children’s trust in robots, and in particular, the occurrence of robot errors during child-robot interactions. She has published in conference venues such as RO-MAN and HRI and has organised several events relevant to psychological research methodology and child robot interaction throughout her PhD. She is a recipient of the KTH Future Digileaders Travel Grant 2020.

Sooraj Krishna (ESR 2) (krishna@isir.upmc.fr)
Sooraj Krishna is a PhD student at L’Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR), Sorbonne University, Paris working with Dr. Catherine Pelachaud on the ESR2 ANIMATAS project. He comes from Kerala, India which is a place known for its cultural heritage and lush greenery. His research interests are in the areas of HRI and HCI, and include Experience design, HRI, Virtual reality and humanitarian applications of the technology. He holds a Masters in Robotics and Automation and has worked at AMMACHI Labs, India, as a researcher, conducting various studies in HRI and VR. His recent works were ‘HRI in the Wild in Rural India’ and Virtual reality based skill training simulators. Drawing inspiration from fiction, art and science, he likes to dream, design and build ideas and likes the company of passionate people to collaborate with. Passionate about design and music, he loves to discover places and meet people as well.

Natalia Calvo (ESR 3) (natalia.calvo@it.uu.se) - Website - LinkedIn - Google Scholar
Natalia Calvo-Barajas is a PhD student in Computer Science with a Specialisation in Human-Computer Interaction at Uppsala University. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechatronics Engineering from the Nueva Granada Military University, Colombia. She also has a Master’s Degree in Robotics Engineering from the University of Genoa, Italy. She was a visiting researcher at Keio University in Japan. Her thesis focuses on the understanding of children’s trust in social robots in educational settings. She believes that AI and Robotics are meant to assist humans in a large variety of fields. Therefore, she is interested in exploiting machine learning techniques for bio-inspired behaviours that may be applied to social robots.

Karen Tatarian (ESR 4) (karen.tatarian@softbankrobotics.com)
Karen Tatarian is a Robotics Researcher at SoftBank Robotics Europe and a doctoral student at Sorbonne University, campus University Pierre et Marie Curie, with a vision of having her model of the implementation of Social Intelligence integrated as part of Pepper. She strongly believes in the motto “be the change that you want to see in the world” and she tries everyday to achieve that. It is her endless curiosity and passion for exploration that lead her on so many adventures to finally be part of the ANIMATAS Project. She received her bachelor’s degree in Physics in 2016 followed by her master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering, with a special focus on robotics and control, in 2018 at AUB – the American University of Beirut. Previously, she got to work on four different projects in four different countries.

Sahba Zojaji (ESR 5) (zojaji@kth.se) - Website - Google Scholar - LinkedIn

Sahba Zojaji is a Ph.D. fellow of Computer Science at KTH-Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. His Ph.D. topic, under the supervision of Professor Christopher Peters, is "Socially compliant behavior modeling for artificial systems and small groups of teachers and learners" which is a part of the ANIMATAS project. The central aspect of his Ph.D. studies is to develop socially compliant small group behaviors for robots and agents tailored to small groups of learners and teachers. This will be accomplished through procedural models and machine-learning approaches based on data corpora from human-human and human-machine interactions and through the use of experiments involving human participants and groups of virtual replicas in virtual reality. He has published in conference venues such as IVA and has been a co-organizer of some events relevant to intelligent virtual agents throughout his Ph.D. His research interests include humanoid and social agents, Human-Machine Interaction, affective computing, and educational technology.

Sina Shahmoradi (ESR 6) (sina.shahmoradi@epfl.ch)
How can we use robots to empower teachers? That’s the question Sina Shahmoradi is trying to answer in his PhD. Robots, like other technologies are on their ways to classrooms; students, especially at the beginning, are engaged to play with them. However we should also ensure the self-efficacy of teachers; are teachers feeling comfortable with managing a classroom with ten robots in addition to twenty students and their tablet/computers? How can orchestration tools help teachers manage their classrooms, adapt and design activities with robots themselves? If you are interested in answering these questions, please join us at ANIMATAS symposium to share more about our experiences in designing a platform for classroom robotic mathematical activities. You can experience being a student engaged in a robotic activity with your friends to learn the basics of mathematics concepts, like a coordinate system and/or being a teacher who wants to manage the robotic activities for your students. He would be happy to share with you the results of his experiments with teachers and students who worked with this platform. Also having your feedback on his path ahead.

Utku Norman (ESR 7) (utku.norman@epfl.ch) - Website - ORCID - LinkedIn - Google Scholar - GitHub
Utku Norman is a doctoral assistant at CHILI Lab of Pierre Dillenbourg at EPFL, Switzerland. He is driven by a desire to help build a better future, and understand the world along the way: his chosen course for how is advancing machine intelligence to develop systems that try to understand us. Utku is curious about how humans, unlike robots, come to be so highly skilled in understanding each other. One way we do so is by representing whether the others understood what we said or did by using mutual modelling, i.e. the reciprocal ability to build a mental representation of the other, by attributing beliefs, desires and other mental states to the other. Thus, the main goal of his PhD is to equip a robot with mutual modelling ability, and use this ability in an educational activity in order to improve the quality of the interactions between the robot and a learner and (hopefully) the learning outcomes.

Sebastian Wallkötter (ESR 8) (sebastian.wallkotter@it.uu.se) - Google Scholar
Sebastian Wallkötter is a Ph.D. student at Uppsala University and tries to model people's expectations about robots; in particular their expectations about how a robot will move around. He then uses this model of people's expectations to modify the robot's movement patterns in order to violate people's expectations less often. This is useful if the robot acts in an environment that it shares with humans, as it helps people figure out what the robot is up to. I.e., when there are multiple hypothetical goals, which one is the robot aiming for.

Manuel Bied (ESR 9) (bied@isir.upmc.fr)
Manuel Bied is a PhD student at Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR) at Sorbonne Université supervised by Prof. Mohamed Chetouani. In his research he’s interested in integrating pedagogical reasoning with robot learning strategies as Reinforcement Learning and Learning-from-Demonstration. He is part of the MSCA-Innovative Training Network ANIMATAS. Prior to joining ISIR he received a B.Sc. and M.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from TU Darmstadt (Germany). His Master’s thesis about Learning-from-Demonstration was conducted in cooperation with Honda Research Institute Europe and supervised by Prof. Jan Peters.

Ramona Merhej (ESR 10) (ramona.merhej@gaips.inesc-id.pt)
Ramona Merhej is a PhD student at INESC-ID supervised by Francisco C. Santos and Prof. Francisco Melo. She holds a Mechanical Engineering diploma from the Lebanese University and a Research Master degree in Aeronautics and Space Engineering with a specialization in Control Systems from l’École CentraleSupélec. However, lately she’s been enthusiastic about AI algorithms. Therefore, for her PhD thesis, she hopes to address and solve some of the obstacles encountered in Multi-Agent collaboration by implementing AI techniques and looking in particular at Reinforcement Learning algorithms.

Tanvi Dinkar (ESR 11) (tanvi.dinkar@telecom-paris.fr) - Google Scholar - Twitter - Linkedin
Tanvi Dinkar is a PhD student at Télécom Paris, Insitut Polytechnique de Paris, and a Marie Curie ITN fellow at ANIMATAS. Her PhD studies the representations of spontaneous speech phenomena (such as disfluencies) to reflect metacognitive states. Her research interests include spoken language understanding, psycholinguistics, communicative strategies and the discrepancies between the way that people speak versus the way that people write. Prior to this, She was a dialogue engineer at Nuance (now Microsoft), coding dialogue systems. She has two masters from the University of Edinburgh, one in Linguistics and one in Speech and Language Processing.

Jauwairia Nasir (ESR 12) (jauwairia.nasir@epfl.ch) - Google Scholar - Linkedin - Twitter - ORCID
Jauwairia Nasir, from Pakistan, is a doctoral assistant at CHILI lab at EPFL with Prof. Pierre Dillenbourg and a Marie Curie fellow at ANIMATAS. She is passionate about building technologies closer to human needs. This reflects in her thesis that critically assesses how ‘engagement’ is modeled in educational HRI in her quest to build smarter social robots with the goal of ‘improving learning at their core’. For this, she is leveraging AI, multi-modal analytics and educational theories. Apart from participating in multidisciplinary conferences/journals as an author/reviewer, organizing events/talks at relevant venues; she serves as the Education Ambassador in Switzerland for the global non-profit Women in AI that led her to being nominated for ‘Hidden Figures Award 2020’ by TechFace. She is vocal about causes such as discrimination free society. Inspired by the desire to grow and contribute, she enjoys exploring new places, meeting diverse people, photography, and art among other things.

Sera Büyükgöz (ESR 13) (sera.buyukgoz@softbankrobotics.com)
Sera Buyukgoz is a Robotics Researcher at SoftBank Robotics Europe, France and PhD student at Sorbonne University, France in the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR) as a fellow of Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN at the EU funded project ANIMATAS. Her research is based on automatic synthesis and instantiation of proactive behavior by robot during human-robot interaction. She received her Master's Degree in Robotics at Plymouth University, UK and her Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering at Bilkent University, Turkey. Before starting her position, she worked on safety in human-robot collaboration as a Visiting Researcher in Kovan Research Laboratory at Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey.

Silvia Tulli (ESR 14) (silvia.tulli@gaips.inesc-id.pt) - Website - GitHub - Google Scholar - Linkedin - ORCID
Silvia Tulli is a PhD Student at INESC-ID supervised by Ana Paiva, Francisco Melo, and Mohamed Chetouani. She is currently a visiting researcher at the Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique at Sorbonne Université. She holds an interdepartmental master's degree in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from the University of Trento. Her PhD thesis focuses on implementing algorithms to generate explanations about agents’ inner workings such that other agents can learn from them. Her work takes inspiration from human social learning theories and causal models. She believes that conveying how or why an agent behaves the way it does (i.e., exhibiting explainable agency) can help in modeling an agent's behaviors, guide the attention of a learner to specific aspects of a demonstration (e.g., causes and effects), and efficiently transfer learning.

Maha Elgarf (ESR 15) (mahaeg@kth.se)
Maha Elgarf is from Cairo Egypt. She had had both her bachelor and master’s degrees in Digital Media Engineering and Technology from the German University in Cairo (GUC). In 2014, she went on a DAAD scholarship to perform her master’s thesis project at the university of Augsburg, Germany. Afterwards, she has been working as a teaching and research assistant at the GUC until July 2018. Ever since she was an undergraduate, she was fond of projects where computer science meets psychology. Hence, grew her passion for affective computing. Her previous research lies under the intersection area between human-computer interaction and affective computing with a focus on the use of technology to improve the lives of people with disabilities or developmental/mental disorders. Research projects that she has worked on has targeted visually impaired people as well as autistic children. She is currently working as a doctoral student under the supervision of Dr. Christopher Peters at KTH, the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. In her PhD she investigates the adaptation of self-other similarity in terms of physical features and behavior to elicit prosociality between humans and virtual characters.