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We are very happy and honored to have these experts joining the workshop as keynote speakers!
Oya Celiktutan
Oya Celiktutan
Talk: Human-Robot Nonverbal Communication
Talk: Human-Robot Nonverbal Communication
Social robots are expected to have a profound impact across many sectors, including education, healthcare, the workplace, and the home. Realizing these applications requires humans and robots to interact and collaborate seamlessly. Alongside verbal communication, successful social interaction relies heavily on the exchange of nonverbal cues, such as gaze, facial expressions, body movements, gestures, and interpersonal distance. Humans naturally use these cues to convey emotions, intentions, and conversational context, while also interpreting the nonverbal behaviour of others.
Inspired by this, enabling robots to understand and generate nonverbal communication has become a major research direction in human–robot interaction. Such capabilities can improve communication efficiency, facilitate collaboration, foster rapport, and ultimately increase users' trust, acceptance, and engagement.
In this talk, I will present our recent progress towards enabling social robots to both understand and generate nonverbal communication, covering topics including gaze, co-speech gestures, and proxemics, together with example practical applications. I will also discuss the remaining open problems and future research challenges toward more natural human–robot interaction.
Dr Oya Celiktutan is a Reader in AI and Robotics in the Department of Engineering at King’s College London, where she leads the Social AI & Robotics Laboratory. She is also the Honorary Robotics Lead at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust.
Her research focuses on multimodal machine learning for autonomous robots and virtual agents that interact naturally with humans, including multimodal perception, human behaviour understanding and prediction, and socially aware navigation and manipulation. Her work has been supported by EPSRC, The Royal Society, and EU Horizon, as well as industrial partners.
She received the EPSRC New Investigator Award in 2020, and her team has won several awards, including Best Paper at IEEE RO-MAN 2022 and recognition at IEEE FG 2021 and the ICCV UDIVA Challenge 2021. She is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction.
More information on Oya's research
Jouke Verlinden
Jouke Verlinden
Talk: Crafting Awareness: Human–Robot Activity in Skilled Manual Work
Talk: Crafting Awareness: Human–Robot Activity in Skilled Manual Work
Craftspersonship is characterized by skilled manual work in which knowledge emerges through continuous interaction between the craftsperson, the tools they use, and the materials they shape. Rather than following predefined procedures, craft relies on perception, embodied expertise, conviviality, and the continuous coupling of action and feedback. Drawing on Yrjö Engeström’s activity theory, craft can be understood as a mediated activity system in which the relationships between craftsperson, instrument, and material evolve throughout the making process.
In this talk, I argue that this perspective offers a powerful framework for designing collaborative robots that move beyond automation toward genuine collaboration. Through examples from craft practice, I explore how effective human–robot collaboration depends on shared awareness and dynamic action coupling, including:
coordination of embodied action;
anticipation of a partner’s intentions; and
responsiveness to changing material conditions.
I will present examples of collaborative manual tasks in where digital technologies support, augment, and learn from skilled workers, and discuss the challenges of preserving the flexibility, creativity, and tacit knowledge that define craftsmanship. The talk concludes by outlining future directions for human-centred cobots that participate in, rather than simply execute, skilled manual work
Jouke Verlinden is a Professor at the Faculty of Design Sciences, Department of Product Development, University of Antwerp, focusing on product design, XR/digital fabrication, and running projects on craftsmanship 4.0. He is affiliated with the Augmented Crafting Lab and the Antwerp Design Factory.
After a career in the business world as an information designer and UI expert, Jouke returned to academia to earn a Ph.D. and a professorship in interactive computer graphics (Delft University of Technology, Industrial Design). He collaborated with artists such as Iris van Herpen (3D-printed dresses) and Joris Laarman (3D-printed bridge) and currently focuses primarily on how human creativity can be enhanced in various contexts.
Martina Morasso
Martina Morasso
Talk: A Dancing Dialogue
Talk: A Dancing Dialogue
Concerning my past research project at IIT (iCub Lab, Prof. Sandini/Dr. Sciutti/Dr. Rea) I am willing to share with you my acknowledgment in an open interview format with some short movies about how to conjugate and possibly combine dance with humanoid robot technologies.
My focus was to elucidate the fundamental sensory-motor-cognitive problems that are required by humans as well as humanoid robots for learning, memorizing, and executing skilled movements: ultimately a way for a cooperating communication. In this context I had really to re-compose and re-combine my motion knowledge, almost a dance-spelling, in order to cancel the separation between human dancer and humanoid robot. All along my time at IIT I started to have a kind of empathic interaction with iCub, a child robot who, as many kids, likes to play but, if overwhelmed by too many stimuli, may give up playing and freezes out. I quickly learned to act and work in a quite polite manner, with the purpose to transmit a feeling of respect and care.
Martina Morasso is an Italian professional dancer, choreograph, and movement trainer based in Dresden, Germany. Her artistic career includes training and competitions in classic and modern dance as well as artistic gymnastics and ballet. Martina holds i.a. a B.A. degree on Theater Activities/Modern Literature (Genova University, Italy), a Diplom as Stage Dancer at the Ballettakademie/Institut für Bühnentanz in Cologne, Germany, and conducted postgraduate studies in Choreography at the Palucca School in Dresden, Germany. As a freelancer, she collaborated successfully across theaters and dance institutes (e.g., TanzNetz Dresden, Oper Leipzig, Landestheater Niederbayern) but her work received international recognition through rewards from Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Germany. Also scientifically, Martina had been speaker i.a. at the "Festival della Scienza", Genova, Italy, and "Movement and Cognition Congress", Oxford, UK.
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