Title: Achieving mutual understanding in conversation: the role of visual communicative signals

Brief bio: Judith Holler is Associate Professor at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition & Behaviour, Radboud University, and affiliated researcher at Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. She completed her PhD (2004) at Manchester University UK, followed by an appointment of Assistant Professor at the School of Psychological Sciences at Manchester University. She earned a Marie Curie Fellowship carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. After she worked as Senior Investigator in Stephen Levinson’s Language & Cognition Department at the MPI, she moved to the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition & Behavior as PI and Associate Professor. Recently, she was awarded a European Research Council consolidator grant funding the current CoAct (Communication in Action) project. Together with Asli Ozyurek, she also coordinates the Nijmegen Gesture Centre.

Website: https://cosilab.org/

Title: How can multi-sensory data help us obtain better assistive robots?

Brief bio: Georgia Chalvatzaki is the research leader of the new intelligent robotic systems and assistants (iROSA) group at TU Darmstadt. She has recently been accepted into the renowned Emmy Noether Programme (ENP) of the German Research Foundation (DFG). In her research group iROSA, her team will research the topic of "Robot Learning of Mobile Manipulation for Assistive Robotics", investigating novel methods for combined planning and learning for enabling mobile manipulator robots to solve complex tasks in house-like environments, with the human-in-the-loop of the interaction process.

Before that, she was a Postdoctoral researcher from October 2019 till January 2020 at the Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) group of Prof. Jan Peters in the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt. She completed her Ph.D. studies in 2019 at the Intelligent Robotics and Automation Lab, advised by Prof. Costas Tzafestas and Prof. Petros Maragos, of the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece. Her thesis topic is "Human-Centered Modeling for Assistive Robotics: Stochastic Estimation and Robot Learning in Decision Making." During her research career, she has worked on eight research projects, and she has published more than 30 papers, most of which in top-tier robotics and machine learning venues, e.g., ICRA, IROS, RA-L.

Website: https://irosalab.com/

Title: Machine Learning for Multimodal Human-Robot Interaction

Brief bio: Heni Ben Amor is an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University where he leads the ASU Interactive Robotics Laboratory. In 2018, he received the NSF CAREER Award - the National Science Foundation's most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty. He also received the Outstanding Assistant Professor Award and Fulton Teachg Award in 2018. Prior to that, he was a Research Scientist at the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines at GeorgiaTech in Atlanta. Heni studied Computer Science at the University of Koblenz-Landau (GER) and earned a Ph.D in robotics from the Technical University Freiberg and the University of Osaka in 2010 where he worked with Hiroshi Ishiguro and Minoru Asada. Before moving to the US, Heni was a postdoctoral scholar at the Technical University Darmstadt working with Jan Peters. Heni's research topics focus on artificial intelligence, machine learning, human-robot interaction, robot vision, and automatic motor skill acquisition. He received the highly competitive Daimler-and-Benz Fellowship as well as several best paper awards at major robotics and AI conferences. Heni has lead several international and national projects as a principal investigator, including projects for NASA, NSF, Intel, Daimler-Benz, Bosch, Toyota, Honda. He is in the program committee of various AI and robotics conferences such as RSS, AAAI, IJCAI, IROS, and ICRA.