Dr. Meeko Oishi’s research focuses on providing assurances of safety in autonomous cyber-physical systems, despite uncertainty in the environment and in human interaction with the autonomous system. She is interested in making autonomous system truly human-centric, in a manner that can accommodate the heterogeneity and variability of humans, without sacrificing reliability or performance. Her lab develops computationally efficient methods and theory for probabilistic safety, based in control, optimization, and non-parametric learning. Techniques her research group has developed have been applied to aircraft flight management systems, space vehicles, and robotics.

Wendy Ju is an associate professor of information science at Cornell Tech, the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

Ju comes to Cornell Tech from the Center for Design Research at Stanford University, where she was executive director of interaction design research, and from the California College of the Arts, where she was an associate professor of interaction design.

Ju’s work in the areas of human-robot interaction and automated vehicle interfaces highlights the ways that interactive devices can communicate and engage people without interrupting or intruding upon them. Ju has developed numerous methods for early-stage prototyping of automated systems to understand how people will respond to systems before they are built.

Ju has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and a master’s degree in media arts and sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her book, “The Design of Implicit Interactions,” was published in 2015. She was inducted into the ACM SIGCHI Academy in 2025.

Ufuk Topcu is a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at The University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the W.A. “Tex” Moncrief, Jr. Chair in Computational Engineering and Sciences VI. He is a core faculty member at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences and Texas Robotics and the director of the Autonomous Systems Group. 

Topcu obtained his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2008. Before joining UT Austin, he was with the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. Topcu’s research focuses on the theoretical and algorithmic aspects of the design and verification of autonomous systems, typically at the intersection of formal methods, reinforcement learning, and control theory. He takes a relatively broad view on autonomy and tends to tackle abstract problems motivated by challenges cutting across multiple applications of autonomy. 

Topcu leads several large-scale, multi-institution projects, including an Air Force MURI project, a NASA ULI project, and an NSF CPS Frontier project. His research contributions have been recognized by the NSF CAREER Award, the Air Force Young Investigator Award, the IEEE CSS Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize, and Oden Institute Distinguished Researcher Award. He was a member of the Computing Community Consortium Council. 

Brian Scassellati is a Professor of Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Mechanical Engineering at Yale University and Director of the NSF Expedition on Socially Assistive Robotics. His research focuses on building embodied computational models of human social behavior, especially the developmental progression of early social skills. Using computational modeling and socially interactive robots, his research evaluates models of how infants acquire social skills and assists in the diagnosis and quantification of disorders of social development (such as autism). His other interests include humanoid robots, human-robot interaction, artificial intelligence, machine perception, and social learning.

Dr. Scassellati received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. His dissertation work (Foundations for a Theory of Mind for a Humanoid Robot) with Rodney Brooks used models drawn from developmental psychology to build a primitive system for allowing robots to understand people. His work at MIT focused mainly on two well-known humanoid robots named Cog and Kismet. He also holds a Master of Engineering in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (1995), and Bachelors degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (1995) and Brain and Cognitive Science (1995), all from MIT.

Dr. Scassellati’s research in social robotics and assistive robotics has been recognized within the robotics community, the cognitive science community, and the broader scientific community. He was named an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in 2007 and received an NSF CAREER award in 2003. His work has been awarded five best-paper awards. He was the chairman of the IEEE Autonomous Mental Development Technical Committee from 2006 to 2007, the program chair of the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) in both 2007 and 2008, the program chair for the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in 2009, and chair of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in 2014.

Descriptions of his recent work have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Popular Science, New Scientist,  the APA Monitor on Psychology, SEED Magazine, and NPR’s All Things Considered.