The Speakers

Marc-Antoine Moinnereau is a researcher and entrepreneur working at the intersection of physiological signal processing, XR, and user experience assessment. He is the co-founder of KAPTICS, a deep-tech company developing custom instrumentation and sensor integration solutions that enable access to multimodal physiological data (EEG, EOG, PPG) within immersive environments. His research focuses on the development of objective QoE metrics for XR applications, with a particular emphasis on EEG-based markers, multimodal data fusion, and data-driven modeling. His work targets both research and applied contexts, including training, human performance, and emerging health-related XR use cases.

Wen Qi (Senior Member, IEEE) received the M.Sc. degree from South China University of Technology in 2015 and the Ph.D. degree from Politecnico di Milano in 2020. She is currently an Associate Researcher/Professor at South China University of Technology and has over 10 years of experience in Human-Robot-Environment perception and interaction, with research focusing on robot teleoperation, complex interaction modeling, and wearable systems. She has served as principal investigator for more than 10 research projects and has published over 80 papers. She has delivered nearly 20 invited and keynote talks and received six IEEE best paper awards or finalist honors, including the Andrew P. Sage Best Paper Award (2021). She holds six Chinese invention patents (five granted) and one PCT patent, and currently serves as an Associate Editor or Editorial Board Member for several journals and as an organizer of international conference sessions and workshops. 

Buye Xu, Ph.D., is a Research Scientist Manager at Meta Reality Labs Research, specializing in audio signal processing and artificial intelligence. With over 15 years of experience spanning academia and industry, Buye leads advancements in speech enhancement, spatial audio, and machine learning for AR/VR and hearing technologies. Prior to joining Meta, he was a Senior Research Engineer at Starkey Hearing Technologies, where he developed cutting-edge solutions for hearing aids and wearable audio devices. Buye is also recognized for his work in active noise cancellation, speech quality assessment, and room acoustics. From 2018 to 2021, he served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America Express Letters (JASA EL).

Takashi Okuma, Ph.D. is a Senior Planning Manager at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). At AIST, he has led research efforts on human behavior sensing, service process modeling, and XR‑based “virtual human‑sensing,” advancing industry applications of XR by integrating sensing, interaction, and workflow augmentation in both physical and virtual environments. He currently serves as the Principal Investigator of the SIP project “Interverse Technologies for Enhanced Communication,” driving R&D on communication‑augmenting technologies that seamlessly connect real‑world and virtual spaces.

Dr. Roozbeh Jafari is a principal investigator at the MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL). He is also an adjunct professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. He joined MIT from Texas A&M where he was the Tim and Amy Leach Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the School of Engineering Medicine. He was formerly a Principal Staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Dr. Jafari received his PhD in computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests lie in the areas of wearable computer design, sensors, systems, and AI for digital health paradigms and, most recently, digital twin for precision health. His laboratory developed groundbreaking technologies including smart rings, smart watches and e-tattoos for continuous cardiovascular monitoring, cuffless blood pressure sensing systems, and precision medicine digital twins. 

Michael Mandel is a Research Scientist in Reality Labs at Meta Platforms, Inc building text interactions for neural interfaces using machine learning and signal processing. He earned his BSc in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his MS and PhD with distinction in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University as a Fu Foundation Presidential Scholar. He was an FQRNT Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Machine Learning laboratory (LISA/MILA) at the Université de Montréal, an Algorithm Developer at Audience Inc, a Research Scientist in Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University, and an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, including via a CAREER award, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Google, Inc.