Keynote Speakers

Prof. Emily S. Cross, ETH Zurich

Emily leads the Professorship for Social Brain Sciences at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. She and her team explore a range of questions related to social perception and interaction, with a particular focus on how to foster and sustain socially engaging encounters with artificial agents.  Emily completing a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at Dartmouth College in the USA, followed by postdoctoral training at the University of Nottingham (UK) and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (DE). She has also held faculty appointments at Radboud University Nijmegen (NL), Bangor University (Wales), University of Glasgow (Scotland), and Macquarie and Western Sydney Universities (Australia). Her work has been funded by national and international organisations, including the European Research Council, National Institutes of Health, Economic and Social Research Council, Ministry of Defence, Fulbright Commission, Australian Research Council and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

Prof. Jesse Thomason, University of Southern California

Jesse is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California and leads the Grounding Language in Actions, Multimodal Observations, and Robots (GLAMOR) Lab. Our research enables agents and robots to better understand and respond to human language by considering the grounded context in which that language occurs by considering three threads: 1) We jointly learning models with language, world perception, and physical action to enable end-to-end agent behavior and improve continual learning; 2) We investigate ways to take advantage of the extra-textual visual world and embodied context in which language is uttered to improve reasoning in language-and-vision and language-guided robotics tasks; and 3) We work to improve speech and sign recognition by leveraging contextual and structural information, as well as to apply language technologies to accessibility and health applications.

Prof. Ryan Calo, University of Washington

Ryan Calo is the Lane Powell and D. Wayne Gittinger Professor at the University of Washington School of Law. He is a founding co-director (with Batya Friedman and Tadayoshi Kohno) of the interdisciplinary UW Tech Policy Lab and a co-founder (with Chris Coward, Emma Spiro, Kate Starbird, and Jevin West) of the UW Center for an Informed Public. Professor Calo holds a joint appointment at the Information School and an adjunct appointment at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.

Professor Calo's research on law and emerging technology appears in leading law reviews (California Law Review, Columbia Law Review, Duke Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, and University of Chicago Law Review) and technical publications (MIT Press, Nature, Artificial Intelligence) and is frequently referenced by the national media. His work has been translated into at least four languages. Professor Calo has testified three times before the United States Senate and organized events on behalf of the National Science Foundation, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Obama White House. He has been a speaker at President Obama's Frontiers Conference, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and NPR's Weekend in Washington.