Organizers

Laura Steckman is the Program Officer at the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). She manages the Trust & Influence program, a program that emphasizes the importance of research on trust in human-technology interaction and teaming.

Samuele Vinanzi is a Senior Lecturer in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at Sheffield Hallam University (UK) and a senior member of the Smart Interactive Technologies (SIT) research laboratory. He earned his BSc and MSc in Computer Engineering from the University of Palermo (Italy) and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Manchester (UK). Dr Vinanzi specializes in Cognitive Robotics: an interdisciplinary field that integrates robotics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and psychology to create robots that perceive, reason, and interact like humans. His research focuses on enabling social collaboration between humans and robots, with particular attention to topics such as emotional intelligence, intention reading, and artificial trust: a new paradigm in human-robot interaction, where robots are not only objects of trust but also active agents capable of assessing and placing trust in humans. He is the author of "In Robots We Trust", a recent book on trust relationships between humans and robots, published by Oxford University Press.

Nandini Iyer is the Program Officer at US Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). Her research interests lie in optimizing human performance using AI and HCI. These systems that integrate AI with HCI to provide decision support must be designed to be trustworthy and explainable in order for it to be adopted within user communities.