Organisation

Vicky Charisi is a researcher with a special interest on the ways in which interactive and intelligent systems affect child’s development. She is a researcher at the European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Centre for Advanced Studies with a focus on the impact of artificial intelligence on human behaviour. Previously, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Twente, the Netherlands working on H2020 projects SQUIRREL, EASEL and DE-ENIGMA focusing on child-robot interaction for typically developing and autistic children.

Alyssa M. Alcorn is a postdoctoral researcher at the UCL Institute of Education, working on the Horizon 2020-funded DE-ENIGMA project (de-enigma.eu), developing a robot-assisted emotion teaching programme for autistic children aged 5-12. She received her PhD in human-computer interaction from the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics. Her work has focused on designing and evaluating technologies for children on the autism spectrum.

James Kennedy is a Postdoctoral Associate at Disney Research Los Angeles. His research interests lie in Human-Robot Interaction and Socially Intelligent Agents. James received his PhD from Plymouth University, U.K. in 2017 for his work using social robots to tutor children. During his PhD, he worked as a Research Assistant on the EU-funded DREAM (Development of Robot-Enhanced therapy for children with AutisM spectrum disorders) project and collaborated with the ALIZ-E (Adaptive Strategies for Sustainable Long-Term Social Interaction), and L2TOR (Second Language Tutoring using Social Robots) projects.

Wafa Johal is a postdoctoral researcher at the Computer-Human Interaction Laboratory for Learning and Instruction (CHILI) at EPFL. She obtained her PhD in Computer Sciences from the University of Grenoble-Alps in France and worked on bodily signals in Child-Robot Interaction. At the CHILI Lab, she specialized on the topic of Robots for Learning, in implementing new technologies and evaluating them in classrooms or therapy centers within the CoWriter and Cellulo projects.

Paul Baxter is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln (U.K.), in the School of Computer Science, a member of the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems, and of the Autism Research and Innovation Centre. His research interests are broadly in the overlap between developmental cognitive robotics and social human-robot interaction.

Chronis Kynigos is a professor of Educational Technology and Mathematics Education and director of the Educational Technology Lab at National Kapodistrian University of Athens. He has been involved in more than ten EC funded projects, as PI-coordinator in three. Recent example of his work is the H2020 ER4STEM project in Educational Robotics which aims to refine, unify and enhance current European approaches to STEM education through robotics in one open operational and conceptual framework.