PhD Student at Johns Hopkins University, USA
Email: shiyecao@cs.jhu.edu
Short bio: Shiye Cao is a PhD student in the Intuitive Computing Lab at Johns Hopkins University co-advised by Professors Chien-Ming Huang and Anqi Liu. Her research focuses on enhancing human-robot collaboration by improving user-robot alignment through multimodal feedback. She is a finalist for the 2022 Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.
PhD Graduand at Johns Hopkins University, USA
Email: mstiber@jhu.edu
Short bio: Maia Stiber is a PhD graduand in the Intuitive Computing Lab at Johns Hopkins University advised by Professors Chien-Ming Huang and Russell Taylor. Her research focuses on understanding and modeling implicit behavioral responses to robot actions to allow the robot to detect robot errors. She has been awarded the JHU Computer Science Department Fellowship and the Jay D. Samstag Engineering Fellowship. She was an organizer of the 2024 ERR@HRI challenge.
PhD Candidate at Johns Hopkins University, USA
Email: amama.mahmood@jhu.edu
Short bio: Amama Mahmood is a PhD candidate in the Intuitive Computing Lab at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating conversational voice assistants that are robust to conversational breakdowns, tailored to individual needs, contexts, and preferences, and ethically designed to avoid social biases. She has been awarded JHU Computer Science Department Fellowship and Creel Family Fellowship. She is a Fulbright Scholar.\\
PhD Candidate at the Information Science Department at Cornell University
Email: mb2554@cornell.edu
Short bio: Maria Teresa Parreira is a PhD candidate at the Information Science Department at Cornell University, supervised by Professors Wendy Ju and Malte Jung. Her research focuses on building tools for socially competent agents through direct interaction with the environment, leveraging multimodality and human‑in‑the‑loop sensing. Previously, she was a research engineer with Prof. Iolanda Leite, at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. She was an organizer of the 2024 ERR@HRI challenge.
Associate Professor of Information Science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech
Email: wendyju@cornell.edu
Short bio: Wendy Ju is an Associate Professor of Information Science at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at Cornell Tech and inaugural faculty in Cornell’s new multi-college Design Tech department. Prof. Ju has innovated numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before the systems are built. In her research, Prof. Ju has worked closely with industrial partners such as Toyota, Spotify, Intel, Ford, Bosch, Renault, Fiat Chrysler, Panasonic, Volvo, Nissan and Mitsubishi. She has a PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford, and a Master’s in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT. Her monograph on The Design of Implicit Interactions was published in 2015. She was an organizer of the 2024 ERR@HRI challenge.
Assistant Professor, DEIB, Politecnico di Milano - Visiting Affiliated Researcher, Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge
Email: micol.spitale@polimi.it
Short bio: Micol Spitale is an Assistant Professor at Politecnico di Milano and a Visiting Affiliated Researcher at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on Social Robotics, aiming to develop robots that are socio-emotionally adaptive and provide coaching for promoting wellbeing. During her Ph.D., she collaborated with IBM Italy and EIT Digital, spending time at the University of Southern California's Interaction Lab as a visiting Ph.D. student. Micol has published extensively in top conferences and journals, accumulating over 1100 citations (h-index=11). She has been involved in European projects and EPSRC UK-funded projects, receiving the EPSRC IAA Impact Grant for Early Career Researchers (25KGBP) while in Cambridge. She was the lead organizer of the 2024 ERR@HRI challenge.
Full Professor of Affective Intelligence & Robotics at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Email: hatice.gunes@cl.cam.ac.uk
Short bio: Hatice Gunes is a Full Professor at the University of Cambridge's Department of Computer Science and Technology, where she directs the Cambridge Affective Intelligence and Robotics Lab (AFAR Lab) and leads award-winning research on multimodal, social, and affective intelligence for AI systems. Her work spans Machine Learning, Affective Computing, Social Signal Processing, and Robotics. She has received numerous awards, including best paper awards at prestigious conferences such as IEEE ACII and IEEE FG. She has also played key and leading roles on such events. Her research on creating robotic coaches for assessing/promoting mental wellbeing received extensive media coverage with >1,700 global reports in The Guardian, BBC News, Medical News Today, Science Daily, Telegraph, Sky News, ITV News, Bloomberg, New York Post etc. Most recently, she was named a Finalist for Sony Women in Tech. Award with Nature 2025. She was an organizer of the 2024 ERR@HRI challenge.
Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University, USA
Email: chienming.huang@jhu.edu
Short bio: Chien-Ming Huang is the John C. Malone Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on designing interactive AI aimed to assist and collaborate with people. His research has received media coverage from MIT Technology Review, Tech Insider, and Science Nation. Huang completed his postdoctoral training at Yale University and received his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award. He was an organizer of the 2024 ERR@HRI challenge.