Hae Won Park, PhD, is a Research Scientist at MIT Media Lab and a Principal Investigator of the Social Robot Companions for Aging and Contextualized Intelligence Grants. She is also an Amazon Visiting Scholar with Lab126. Her research focuses on socio-emotive AI and personalization of socially embodied agents that support long-term interaction and relationship building with users. Her work is applied to a range of real-world domains including early childhood education and healthier ageing in place. Her research has been published at top robotics, HCI, and AI venues and has received many awards for best paper and innovative robot applications.

Antonio Sgorbissa (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor at the University of Genoa, where he teaches in EMARO+ and JEMARO+, the European and Japan-Europe Masters in Advanced Robotics. He is the Coordinator of National and EU research projects, among which the H2020 project CARESSES caressesrobot.org. Also, he is local Coordinator of the ongoing IENE-10 project, aimed at preparing health and social care workers to work with intelligent robots in health and social care environments. He received a number of acknowledgements for his recent work: among the others, CARESSES has been acknowledged “Project of the month” by the EU and has been included among the “100 Italian Robotics & Automation Stories” in a report presented by Enel S.p.a. in February 2020. His research focuses on Autonomous Robotic Behaviour, with a focus on Culture-Awareness, Knowledge representation, Motion Planning, Wearable and Ubiquitous Robotics. He is the director of RASES, the interuniversity center on Robotics and Autonomous Systems in Emergency Scenarios. He is the author of more than 160 articles indexed in international databases and has been member of the Organizing Committee in top-ranked robotic conference as well as Associate Editor for the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems edited by SAGE and Intelligent Service Robotics by Springer. 

Astrid Weiss is Assistant Professor on Human Interactions with Embodied AI at the TU Wien, Austria. With a background in Sociology and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), she studies how humans interact with new technology with a special interest in user involvement and evaluation studies for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) focusing on in-the-wild studies and controlled experiments. She is especially interested in the impact novel technology has on our everyday life and what makes people accept or reject technology.

Maartje de Graaf is an Assistant Professor of Information and Computing Science at the University of Utrecht. In the past, she has worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative with a 2-year Rubicon grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). She has a Bachelor of Business Administration in Communication Management (2005), a Master of Science in Media Communication (2011), and a PhD in Communication Science and Human-Robot Interaction (2015). Since technologies are increasingly endowed with complex and humanlike interfaces and are becoming technically feasible for real-world applications, everyday living is transformed in unprecedented ways. To deal with this potentially radical transformation, De Graaf’s research gains detailed insights into the scope and limits of people’s humanlike treatment of robots on an affective, behavioral and cognitive level. This knowledge reveals to what extent we regard robots as social beings, which has profound ethical and societal implications for our interactions with these systems.