Speakers

Eva Wiese is a professor at the Berlin Institute of Technology and a researcher in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Human-Robot Interaction. Her work focuses on social attention and embodied cognition, and she investigates how humans perceive and interact with social agents, including robots, using methods such as behavioral measures, eye tracking, and EEG. She has contributed to understanding the cognitive processes involved when humans judge the intentionality of actions performed by social agents and how attributing a mind to these agents influences attention, perception, and performance. Her research has significant implications for the design of conversational AI and social robots, highlighting the importance of considering users' subjective perceptions when humanizing these technologies.

Sebastian Zepf is a researcher in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). His research interests include multimodal and natural human-machine interaction, empathetic and emotionally intelligent user interfaces as well as proactive and autonomous assistants. He received his Ph.D. in computer science in 2021 from Ulm University (Germany) in collaboration with the Mercedes-Benz AG (Sindelfingen, Germany) and the MIT Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, USA). Currently, Sebastian Zepf is a HCI Researcher at the Mercedes-Benz AG, working at the intersection of User Experience (UX) and AI to shape the future of the Mercedes Virtual Assistant. He is also an affiliated researcher at the Institute of Communications Engineering at Ulm University and a lecturer in multimodal user experience at Hochschule Furtwangen University.