Maja Mataric' is a Chan Soon-Shiong distinguished professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Pediatrics at the University of Southern California, founding director of the USC Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center (rasc.usc.edu), co-director of the USC Robotics Research Lab (robotics.usc.edu), interim Vice President of Research, past Vice Dean for Research (2006-2019) and past President of the USC faculty and the Academic Senate. She received her PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from MIT in 1994, MS in Computer Science from MIT in 1990, and BS in Computer Science from the University of Kansas in 1987. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), IEEE, AAAI, and ACM, and recipient of the US Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) from President Obama, and the Okawa Foundation, NSF Career, the MIT TR100 Innovation, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career, the Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Innovation, Viterbi School Service Award and Junior Research Awards, and is featured in the documentary movie "Me & Isaac Newton." She is an advisory editor of three major journals and has published extensively in various areas of robotics. Here is her Google Scholar profile. Prof. Mataric' is actively involved in K-12 outreach, leading the USC Viterbi K-12 STEM Center and developing free curricular materials for elementary and middle-school robotics courses in order to engage student interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) topics. Her Interaction Lab's research into socially assistive robotics is aimed at endowing robots with the ability to help people reach their potential through individual assistance (for convalescence, rehabilitation, training, and education) and team cooperation (for habitat monitoring and emergency response). Research details are found at robotics.usc.edu/interaction.

Professor Agnieszka Wykowska leads the unit “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction” at the Italian Institute of Technology (Genoa, Italy), and is an adjunct professor of engineering psychology at the Luleå University of Technology as well as visiting professor at the University of Manchester. She graduated in neuro-cognitive psychology (2006, LMU Munich), obtained PhD in psychology (2008) and the German “Habilitation” (2013) from LMU Munich. In 2016 she was awarded the ERC Starting grant “InStance: Intentional Stance for Social Attunement”. She is Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Social Robotics and Associate Editor of Frontiers in Psychology. She is a board member and president-elect of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN), member of ELLIS (European Lab for Learning and Intelligent Systems) and core member of Association of ERC Grantees. In her research, she combines cognitive neuroscience methods with human-robot interaction in order to understand the human brain mechanisms in interaction with natural and artificial agents. Email address: agnieszka.wykowska@iit.it Website of the ERC project: https://www.instanceproject.eu

Dr. Shruti Chandra is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research laboratory at the University of Waterloo, Canada funded by Canada 150 Research Chairs Program. She holds a Joint PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland and Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal. During her PhD, she worked on the project called Cowriter where she investigated how children could improve their handwriting skills with the help of social robots. Her current research primarily focuses on using social robots to aid children with learning difficulties, assist people with developmental speech disorders, foster intergenerational game-play, and investigate social learning mechanisms between humans and robots. Her research interests include social robotics, assistive robotics, educational robotics, long-term human-robot interaction, autonomous robots, psychology, interaction design, pedagogy, artificial Intelligence and machine learning.