Professor Agnieszka Wykowska leads the unit “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction” at the Italian Institute of Technology (Genoa, Italy), and is an adjunct professor of engineering psychology at the Luleå University of Technology.

She studied neuro-cognitive psychology (Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich) and philosophy (Jagiellonian University, Krakow). She obtained PhD in psychology and the German “Habilitation” from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Her interdisciplinary background resonates in the topic of her ERC grant “Intentional stance for social attunement” (awarded in 2016,https://instanceproject.eu).

Prof. Wykowska is an Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Social Robotics (Springer) and an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Psychology (section Cognition). She is a Guest (co-)Editor of a special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B titled “From social brains to social robots: Applying neurocognitive insights to human-robot interaction (2018/2019), and of a research topic “Computational approaches for human-human and human-robot social interactions” (2018-2019) in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. She is a board member of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN). She serves as Program Committee member for various conferences, such as “International Conference on Social Robotics”, or “Human-Robot Interaction”. In her research, she examines mechanisms of human social cognition with the use of cognitive neuroscience methods and interactive protocols involving humanoid robots.

After several years as head principle scientist for SoftBank Robotics Europe, in addition to serving as scientific coordinator for the company's collaborative projects, Dr. Amit Kumar Pandey now works as the Chief Technology Officer and the Chief Science Officer at Hanson Robotics. Dr. Pandey has also worked as a researcher in robotics and AI at LAAS-CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) in Toulouse, France, where he obtained his Ph.D. in robotics through INSA (National Institutes of Applied Sciences), University of Toulouse. Dr. Pandey's thesis tied for second in the running for the Georges Giralt Award for the best Ph.D. theses in robotics in Europe, awarded by European Union Robotics (euRobotics).

For more about Dr. Pandey and his work, please visit his website.

Dr Ocnarescu (Ph.D. in Design Science) is a Design Researcher at Strate School of Design (Paris, France) in the Research and Innovation Department. Her main research fields are: Social Robotics, Experience Design, Interaction Design and Design for education. Her PhD, entitled “Aesthetic Experience and Innovation Culture”, shows how design creates an innovation culture but also memorable experiences for the researchers of a Research & Development Department (at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs France, now Nokia Bell Labs). At Strate she coordinates Robotics by design lab, teaches classes on Experience Design, Speculative Design and Design & Robotics and she co-supervises two ongoing PhDs.

Biomimetics is the approach of abstracting principles from nature to assist in the design of novel technologies. In Sheffield, we have been following a biomimetic approach for over two decades to develop animal-like robots with control systems modelled on the mammalian brain. Over the past five years, we have adapted this approach, in partnership with industrial designers, to create the commercial animal-like social robot, MiRo, which is designed to have animal-like features and affordances rather than emulate one specific animal. Alongside, brain-inspired control, we emphasise support for animal-like social engagement including non-verbal communication and physical interaction through social touch. To identify useful applications for biomimetic robots we seek to learn from the use of animals in education and care. For instance, in schools, robots can provide an alternative, in both educational and pastoral roles, for the traditional “classroom pet”. In healthcare, therapy robots can be designed that leverage ideas and methods from animal-assisted therapy, to support people with anxiety, depression, or loneliness. This talk will outline our biomimetic approach to creating life-like robots, discuss the design philosophy behind the MiRo robot, and summarise recent pilot studies using MiRo in the lab, and “in the Wild”, as platform for education and therapy.

Tony Prescott (@tonyjprescott) is Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the University of Sheffield in the UK, and is the Director of Sheffield Robotics, a cross-disciplinary research institute with over two hundred researchers. His background mixes psychology, neuroethology and brain theory with robotics and AI, and his research aims at answering questions about natural intelligence by creating synthetic entities with capacities such as perception, memory, emotion and sense of self. He has co-founded the International Living Machines conference series, the Barcelona Summer School on Cognition, Brain and Technology, and Consequential Robotics a UK startup developing assistive and companion robots. With his collaborators he has created a number of novel animal-like robot platforms including Scratchbot (2009), Shrewbot (2012) and the commercial biomimetic robot MiRo (2016–). Tony has co-authored over 200 journal articles and conference papers and recently published the edited volumes Scholarpedia of Touch (Springer, 2016) and the Handbook of Living Machines (OUP, 2018). Tony has received over 7M Euros in research funding from UK and European Union sponsors and is currently working to develop brain-like control and memory systems for robots as a partner in the EU Human Brain Project. He is also funded by the Wellcome Trust as part of an international collaboration that seeks to develop advanced technologies to help people with disabilities. His research has been covered by major news and scientific media including the BBC, CNN, Discovery Channel, Science Magazine and New Scientist.