Invited Speakers

Speaker-Bio: Selma Sabanovic is an associate professor of informatics at Indiana University Bloomington. Her work combines the social studies of computing -- focusing particularly on the design, use and consequences of socially interactive and assistive robots in different social and cultural contexts -- with research on human-robot interaction and social robot design.

When we talk about cross-cultural research, we often think of the cultures of different nations or large geographic areas (e.g. East v West). Many different kinds of social groups, however, can have their own distinct cultures – organizations, generations, and communities. In this talk, I will discuss how cultural factors in different types of cultural contexts, including eldercare organizations, intergenerational communities, rural and urban locations, as well as different countries, can affect the design, perception, and use of robots.

Speaker-Bio: Ana Paiva is a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (Departamento de Engenharia Informática) of Instituto Superior Técnico from the University of Lisbon ( Universidade de Lisboa). She is also the group leader of GAIPS, (Grupo de Agentes Inteligentes e Personagens Sintéticas, a research group on agents and synthetic characters at INESC-ID. Her main scientific interests are in the area of Autonomous Agents, Embodied Conversational Agents and Robots and Multiagent Simulation Systems. Prof. Ana Paiva has been researching in the area of artificial intelligence for the past twenty years, having also taught at IST during that period

TBD

Speaker-Bio: Gabriel Skantze is a Professor in Speech Technology at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. He is leading several research projects on Conversational AI and Human-Robot Interaction, studying and modelling phenomena such as turn-taking, grounding and feedback in spoken interaction. He is also co-founder and chief scientist of the social robotics company Furhat Robotics.

Just like we prefer physical meetings over phone calls, social robots can potentially offer a much richer interaction experience than smart speakers and voice assistants. The expressivity of the face that is offered by robots like Furhat allows for a much richer set of communicative signals, and allows multiple people to interact with the robot at the same time. While this development is very exciting, the interactions offered by the current systems are limited in many ways. In this talk, I will present our ongoing work on modeling conversational turn-taking. As current systems lack the sophisticated coordination mechanisms found in human-human interaction, they are often plagued by interruptions or sluggish responses. I will also discuss why one model will not fit all users, and why it is important to understand demographic (gender and age) differences in turn-taking behavior, and why it will be important to also take cultural aspects into account.

Speaker-Bio: Masahiro Shiomi is a senior research scientist and a group leader of the Agent Interaction Design Laboratory at the Interaction Science Laboratories at ATR, Kyoto, Japan. His research interests include human-robot interaction, social touch interaction, robotics for childcare, and multiple social robots.

The physical existence of social robots enables them to realize active touch interaction, which plays an essential role in human-human interaction. We aim to develop a safe and trustworthy social touch mechanism in human-robot interaction via observing human touch behaviors. In this talk, I will present the latest case studies in Japan with social robots that physically interact with people.

Speaker-Bio: Barbara Bruno is a post-doc researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Lausanne, Switzerland, deputy head of the CHILI lab, with research interest in Socially Assistive Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction. She is co-founder of the start-up company Teseo, Italy. Barbara received the M.Sc. and the Ph.D. in Robotics from the University of Genoa in 2011 and 2015, respectively. She is part of the Swiss nationwide NCCR Robotics organisation and currently involved in the EU ITN ANIMATAS and the Swiss-French research project iReCHeCk. In 2017-2019 she was Technical Manager of the H2020 project CARESSES, and she has been Visiting Scholar at Örebro University (Sweden), with the Italian-Swedish project WEARAMI. She has published more than 45 articles in international journals and peer-reviewed international conferences.

TBD