Elizabeth (Beth) Phillips is an Assistant Professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy in the Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership and the Warfighter Effectiveness Research Center (WERC). She recently completed a postdoctoral appointment in the Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative (HCRI) at Brown University. Beth earned her Ph.D. in Applied Experimental and Human Factors Psychology at the University of Central Florida. Her research focuses on human interactions with robots, autonomous systems, and related technologies like augmented and virtual reality. She studies how we can design these systems to be better partners, teammates, and companions for people in the near future.

Website: https://www.elizabethkphillips.com/

Kerstin Sophie Haring is starting her appointment as Assistant Professor at the University of Denver in the Department of Computer Science this summer. She completed her PhD in Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, Cognitive Science, and Human-Robot Interaction at the University of Tokyo in Japan and her Master in Computer Science at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Dr. Haring is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the Warfighter Effectiveness Research Center (WERC) at the United States Air Force Academy where she seeking to enhance shared situational awareness in human-machine teaming and human-robot interaction.

Serena Ivaldi is a tenured research scientist at Inria, leading the humanoid and human-robot interaction activities of the Team Larsen in Inria Nancy, France. She earned her Ph.D. in Humanoid Technologies in 2011 at the Italian Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Inria, she was post-doctoral researcher in UPMC in Paris, France, then at the University of Darmstadt, Germany. She was PI of the EU projects CoDyCo (FP7); she is currently PI of the EU projects AnDy (H2020) and Heap (CHIST-ERA). She is also involved in the French ANR project Flying CoWorker. Her research is focused on humanoid robotics and human-robot collaboration, using machine learning to improve the control, prediction, adaptation and interaction skills of robots. She strongly believes in user evaluation, i.e., making potential end-users evaluate the robotics technologies to improve usability, trust and acceptance.

Website: https://members.loria.fr/SIvaldi/

Marwa ElDiwiny is currently a research graduate at Twente University. Before joining Twente University, she was a research engineer at Inria, Lille nord Europe and research scholar at Tartu Institute of Technology (TIT). Primarily, she is working as assistant lecturer in the Mechatronics and Industrial Robotics Program, Minia university, Egypt where she is now on a sabbatical leave. She is currently working on designing and modelling active soft artificial muscle actuators for surgical robotic application.

Chinwe Ekenna is an Assistant Professor at the University at Albany in the Department of Computer Science. She completed her PhD from Texas A&M University studying and implementing motion planning algorithms. Chinwe has explored intelligent adaptation of robotic motion planning to improve planning quality and time. She is currently the Director of the Robotics, Algorithms and Computable Systems Lab (RACS) and researches on topological data analysis implementations on motion planning algorithms and machine learning paradigms to aid in better planning algorithms.

Anastasiia Varava received a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Karazin Kharkiv National University, Ukraine, in 2013 and a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the University of Nice Sophia Antipolis, France, in 2014. She is currently a Ph.D. student at the Centre for Autonomous Systems, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden. She is interested in mathematical representations for robotic manipulation and path planning.​

We are supported locally by the University of Freiburg's Autonomous Intelligent Systems group.

• Marina Kollmitz
• Freya Fleckenstein
• Noha Radwan
• Wera Winterhalter