Keynote Speakers

Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn is Canada’s 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics at University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She has a joint appointment with the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Systems Design Engineering and is cross-appointed with the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at University of Waterloo. She is the director of the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory. The main research areas are Human-Robot Interaction, Social Robotics, Assistive Technology and Artificial Life.

Workshop Presentation

Title: Studying interaction of children with social robots - Challenges and opportunities

Abstract: My talk will highlight some of the work I've been involved in over the past 20 years in working with children and social robots. This involved many studies including children with autism, but also typically developing children, with different roles the robots adopted depending on the context. I will mention briefly a few of those studies and discuss some lessons learnt from this research.

Dr. Takayuki Kanda is a professor at Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan in the Department of Graduate School of Informatics. He is a visiting group leader in the Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratorie, Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International. His disciplines include Artificial Intelligence, Human-computer Interaction, Computer Engineering with an expertise in areas such as Robotics, Automation, Robotics Modeling, Artificial Intelligence, Social Influence, Mobile Robotics, and Human-Robot Interaction.

Workshop Presentation

Title: Social robots interacting with children in public space

Abstract: Social robots are coming to appear in our daily lives. Yet, it is not as easy as one might imagine. We developed a human-like social robot, Robovie, and are studying how to make it serve for people in public space, such as a shopping mall, for information-providing tasks. Children exhibited a great interest to the robots, which sometimes helped the robots to serve for the purpose, but sometimes not, e.g. inviting “robot abuse” problem. I plan to introduce a couple of relevant studies.