Organisers

Guy Laban (guy.laban@cl.cam.ac.uk) is a Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. His research explores how people share their emotions with artificial agents and how these interactions shape social dynamics and well-being. He was awarded the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE) 2024 Dissertation Award (2nd Runner-Up), served as publicity chair for ACII 2024, associate editor for ICSR 2024, and has co-organized workshops on conversational AI, including Robo-Identity 2 (HRI 2022) and Ethics of CUIs (CHI 2022).

Julian Hough is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at Swansea University. His research focuses on applying AI and NLP techniques to interaction data and within interactive systems to improve the quality of HAI. He has won an outstanding paper award at COLING 2020 and was appointed a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute (2019-2021). Since 2019, he has been co-chair of the SemDial conference series and has served in roles in international conference venues such as General Chair (SemDial), Area Chair (InterSpeech, EACL) and Poster chair (HAI), and leads the UK EPSRC-funded FLUIDITY project.

Minha Lee​ (​m.lee@tue.nl​) is an Assistant Professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Department of Industrial Design, with a background in philosophy, digital arts, and HCI. Her research concerns morally relevant interactions with various agents like robots or chatbots. Her work explores how we can explore our moral self-identity through conversations with digital entities, e.g., via acting compassionately towards a chatbot. She co-leads the steering committee of the ACM CUI conference series after serving as one of the general chairs of the CUI 2023 conference.

Alva Markelius (ajkm4@cam.ac.uk) is a PhD candidate and Cambridge Trust Scholar at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at the University of Cambridge. She is also recipient of Top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ award 2024 and committee chair of the Centre for Human Inspired AI Early Career Community. Her main research interests are the ethics of social AI and robotics, specifically in the intersection of embodied robotics and large language models. She also holds an MSt degree in AI Ethics \& Society at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. 

Mary Ellen Foster is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow. Her primary research interests are human-robot interaction, social robotics, and embodied conversational agents. Her recent work focusses on consulting the widest possible range of stakeholders when designing and deploying social robots, to ensure that the system takes into account the needs of all potential users and operators. She has previously co-organised a workshop series on Public-Space Social Robotics.

Jane Stuart-Smith is Professor of Phonetics and Sociolinguistics,  Co-Director of the Glasgow University Laboratory of Phonetics at the University of Glasgow. Her main research interests are on the interfaces between language and society, especially relating to speech of stigmatised varieties, e.g. Working-class vernaculars and ethnolects (phonetics, sociophonetics, sociolinguistics). She has a long-term interest in speech and language accommodation beyond typical face-to-face interactions, especially without typical human interaction, e.g. experiencing broadcast media, Human-Robot-Interaction. 

Muneeb Imtiaz Ahmad is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Swansea University’s Computational Foundry, and his research is situated within the Human-Centred Computing domain and is at the Intersection of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Intelligent Robotics and Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence (AI). He has recently received funding from Morgan's Advances Studies Institute to establish best practices for designing healthcare social robots with culturally sensitive AI, focusing on reducing communication bias and promoting efficient communication and engagement. He acted as a general co-chair at HAI 2024 and is acting as a publicity chair at the ICMI 2025 confrence.