Hatice Gunes is a Professor of Affective Intelligence and Robotics (AFAR) and the Head of the AFAR Lab at the University of Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology. Her expertise is in the areas of affective computing and social signal processing cross-fertilising research in multimodal interaction, computer vision, signal processing, machine learning and social robotics. She has published over 125 papers in these areas (h-index=35, citations > 6,500), with most recent works on lifelong learning and fairness for facial expression recognition and affective robotics and longitudinal HRI for wellbeing. Some of her research highlights include RSJ/KROS Distinguished Interdisciplinary Research Award Finalist at IEEE RO-MAN’21, Distinguished PC Award at IJCAI’21, Best Paper Award Finalist at IEEE RO-MAN’20, Finalist for the 2018 Frontiers Spotlight Award, Outstanding Paper Award at IEEE FG’11, and Best Demo Award at IEEE ACII’09. Prof Gunes is the former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC), and was the General Co-Chair of ACII’19, and the Program Co-Chair of ACM/IEEE HRI’20 and IEEE FG’17. She was a member of the Human-Robot Interaction Steering Committee (2018-2021) and was the Chair of the Steering Board of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (2017-2019). In 2019 she was awarded the prestigious EPSRC Fellowship as a personal grant (2019-2024) to investigate adaptive robotic emotional intelligence for well-being, and was named a Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute– UK’s national centre for data science and artificial intelligence (2019-2021). Prof Gunes is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a member of the AAAC and a Staff Fellow of Trinity Hall.

Tom Ziemke is Professor of Cognitive Systems in the computer science department at Linköping University, where he leads the Cognition & Interaction Lab. His main research interests are in situated and embodied cognition, with a focus on people’s interaction with autonomous technologies, such as social robots and automated vehicles.

Antonio Sgorbissa, PhD, is Associate Professor at the Università degli Studi of Genova and teacher in EMARO+ and JEMARO+, the European and Japanese Masters' in Advanced Robotics. He has been coordinator of H2020 CARESSES (Culturally Aware Robots and Environmental Sensor Systems for Elderly Support) and Principal Investigator in National and EU projects, including DIONISO (a multidisciplinary effort focusing on ICT for intervention in earthquakes) and WearAmI (focusing on assistive robotics in smart environments). He is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics, Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, and Intelligent Service Robotics. He is member of the board of directors and executive vice president of I-RIM, Italian Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines, Director of the Social Robotics Lab at University of Genova and RASES, the inter-university center on Robotics and Autonomous Systems in Emergency Scenarios. He is the author of more than 160 scientific articles indexed in international databases and awarded five patents as an inventor.