Organizers

Dr. Ali Ayub is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Waterloo, Canada researching in cognitive architectures and human-robot interaction, a natural continuation of his PhD dissertation titled, “Few-Shot Continual Learning of Visual Concepts”. He obtained his Master and PhD degrees from The Pennsylvania State University in 2017 and 2021, respectively. His research interests include curiosity and intrinsic motivations, lifelong learning, assistive robotics and humanrobot interaction, which reflect his desire to develop robots that can be deployed in real-world environments. He was selected as a "Pioneer" in HRI 2021.

Dr. Marcus Scheunemann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. His focus is on the fully autonomous behavior generation for robots to interact with humans based on information-theoretic measures. He entered this research avenue during his PhD, where he worked on the topic of “Autonomous and Intrinsically Motivated Robots for Sustained Human-Robot Interaction” on a PhD scholarship of Computer Science of the University of Hertfordshire. He currently investigates how behavior patterns a robot creates during exploration can be retained and reused. He further is an active member of the RoboCup community where his work is centered around machine learning for object recognition and locomotion, and on developing a general robot framework based on ROS 2.

Dr. Christoforos Mavrogiannis is a postdoctoral research associate in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He is broadly interested in algorithmic human-robot interaction with a particular focus on social robot navigation and expressive robot motion generation. He has been a best-paper award finalist at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and selected as a “Pioneer” in the HRI and RSS conferences. He has also led open-source initiatives such as MuSHR, and OpenBionics for which he was a finalist for the Hackaday Prize and a winner of the Robotdalen International Innovation Award. He holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University, and a Diploma in mechanical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens.

Dr. Jimin Rhim is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at McGill University. Her research include AI and robot ethics, human-robot interaction, affective robotics, and cross-cultural studies. As a human-centered roboticist, her research goal is to address the complete life cycle of robotics with social and ethical impacts on society. She investigates both conceptual and computational challenges in robotic acceptance, trust, and safety by using interdisciplinary research approaches to bridge the gap between theory and practical implementation. Further, her doctoral thesis entitled “Social-Value Embedded Ethical Decision-Making Framework of Autonomous Vehicles: A Cross-cultural Study” was selected as one of the top research highlights of 2019 KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology).

Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn, IEEE Fellow, 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. Before moving to Canada in 2018 she coordinated the highly successful Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire UK. Professor Dautenhahn is the director of the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory (SIRRL). She has published widely in Human-Robot Interaction, Social Robotics, Assistive Technology, and Developmental and Cognitive Robotics.

Professor Verena Hafner is head of the Adaptive Systems Group at Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin in Germany. Before ¨ moving to Berlin, she worked as an associate researcher in the Developmental Robotics Group at Sony Computer Science Labs in Paris, France. She is part of the Programme Committee of the DFG Priority Programme The Active Self (SPP 2134) and PI in the DFG Cluster of Excellence “Science of Intelligence”. Her research interests include sensorimotor interaction and learning, joint attention, internal models, and exploration strategies.

Professor Chrystopher Nehaniv is a Mathematician, Computer Scientist, Complex Adaptive Systems Researcher, and, since August 2018, Full Professor in the Departments of Systems Design Engineering and of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. He is also a visiting Professor with the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. He is founder of the Waterloo Algebraic Intelligence and Computation Laboratory (WAICL), and with Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn, a cofounder of the University of Waterloo’s Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory (SIRRL). He has published widely in Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Architectures and Social Robotics.

Professor Daniel Polani is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Director of the Centre for Computer Science and Informatics Research (CCSIR) and Head of the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire. In 2017-2019 he was president of RoboCup Federation. His research interests are principles of cognition and intelligent decision-making, expressed in the language of information theory. The methods provide insights into the dynamics of cognition and models and tools to understand the structure of decision-making in agents, design intrinsic motivations, to model sensomotoric evolution and to investigate links between AI and biological intelligence.