Organizing Committee

Micol Spitale, Politecnico di Milano & University of Cambridge

Micol Spitale is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering at Politecnico di Milano (Polimi), as well as a Visiting Affiliated Researcher at the University of Cambridge. In recent years, her research has been focused on the field of Social Robotics, exploring ways to develop robots that are socio-emotionally adaptive and provide ‘coaching’ to promote wellbeing.  She has a strong background in affective computing, human-robot interaction, and machine learning applications to human behavioural analysis. She has been awarded “cum laude” a Ph.D. in Information Technology, Computer Science and Engineering Area at the Politecnico di Milano, co-funded by IBM Italy and EIT Digital, in October 2021, under the supervision of Prof. Franca Garzotto. During her Ph.D., she spent several months at the University of Southern California (USC) in the Interaction Lab as a visiting Ph.D. student. She published works in top conferences (HRI, ACII, RO-MAN) and journals (MTAP, ACM-CS, THRI), gaining over 1100 citations (h-index=11). She has participated in European projects and EPSRC UK-funded projects. While in Cambridge, she has been awarded the EPSRC IAA Impact Grant for Early Career Researchers (25KGBP). She is currently the lead guest editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics Special Issue on Embodied Agents for Wellbeing.

Alyssa Kubota, San Francisco State University

Alyssa Kubota is an Assistant Professor in the School of Engineering at San Francisco State University, and director of the Personalized Health and Assistive Technologies (PHAST) Lab. Her research focuses on enabling technological systems to intelligently, autonomously, and longitudinally interact with people in real-world environments. Her work combines human-centric artificial intelligence and participatory design approaches to develop robotic technologies to support and empower people in their everyday lives. She has been recognized at premier robotics venues, including HRI and CSCW, where she has received three Best Paper Award Honorable Mentions. She also received the Dissertation Award, Doctoral Award for Excellence in Research, and an Exceptional Teaching Assistant Award from the University of California San Diego where she received her M.S. and Ph.D in Computer Science and Engineering.

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira, University of Michigan

Patrícia Alves-Oliveira is an Assistant Professor in Robotics at the University of Michigan. Previously, she was a Senior UX Designer for the Astro robot at Amazon Lab126. Patricia designs interactions for social robots that empower and enhance human well being. Her interdisciplinary background unifies the fields of robotics, design research, and psychology. Patricia was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. from ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon and spent time at Cornell University as a Visiting Graduate Scholar. Her research received two Best Paper Awards at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. She co-founded Talking Robotics and is now a volunteer in Open Style Lab. 

Hatice Gunes, University of Cambridge

Prof Gunes is an internationally recognized scholar in affective computing and affective robotics. She is a former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC) and was a Faculty Fellow (2019-2021) of the Alan Turing Institute – UK’s national centre for data science and artificial intelligence.

She obtained her PhD in computer science from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia as an awardee of the Australian Government International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (IPRS) - a prestigious scholarship awarded on the basis of academic merit and research capacity. As a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London, she played a crucial role in the EU SEMAINE project, that created the world's first publicly available multimodal, fully autonomous, and real-time human-agent interaction system ( the SAL system). Attentive to user affect and nonverbal expressions, the project developed novel nonverbal audiovisual human behaviour analysis and multimodal agent behaviour synthesis capabilities, and won the Best Demo Award at IEEE ACII’09.

Now directing the Affective Intelligence and Robotics Lab (AFAR Lab) at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, Prof Gunes spearheads research on multimodal, social, and affective intelligence for AI systems, particularly embodied agents & robots, by cross-fertilizing research in the fields of Machine Learning, Affective Computing, Social Signal Processing, and Human Nonverbal Behaviour Understanding.

Honoured with prestigious funding, including a very competitive 5-year EPSRC Fellowship (2019-present) and the EU Horizon 2020 Grant (2019-2022), she has been leading the AFAR team in establishing new collaborations with experienced wellbeing professionals as well as the Department of Psychiatry, which earned them the RSJ/KROS Distinguished Interdisciplinary Research Award Finalist at IEEE RO-MAN’21, and exploring ambitious new horizons that were consistenly recognized with awards and honours. These range from affective intelligence for service robotics which was recognized with the Best Paper Award Finalist at IEEE RO-MAN’20, to using robots for mental wellbeing assessment in children — with over 1,000 global media reports and an interview with The Guardian — and taking the robotic wellbeing coaches from the lab to the workplace, attracting over 700 media coverages. The latter were honoured with the Runner-up for the Collaboration Award at the 2023 University of Cambridge Vice-Chancellor's Awards for Research Impact and Engagement. The AFAR team's ongoing efforts in mitigating bias in affective and wellbeing computing also earned them the Best Paper Award in Responsible Affective Computing at IEEE ACII'23.

Prof Gunes's impact extends beyond academia, contributing to national and international projects with real-world outcomes. Her industry collaboration on the Innovate UK Sensing Feeling project resulted in a commercially available portable sensor with passive, real-time, and in-the-wild deep learning-based affect sensing, leading to a US patent and the establishment of the spin-out company SensingFeeling.

She is regularly invited to give talks at top-tier venues, addressing both scientific and broader audiences. Notable engagements include keynote talks at IEEE FG’19 and ICPR’22, as well as appearances at the Hay Festival, the Royal Institution, the Cambridge Science Festival, and the Festival of Ideas.

You can visit her home page for further details.