The Speakers

Julie A. Adams is the associate director of research in the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute, professor of computer science in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and professor (courtesy) of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering in the School of Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University. She was the founder of the Human-Machine Teaming Laboratory at Vanderbilt University, prior to moving the laboratory to Oregon State. Adams has worked in the area of human-machine teaming for over 25 years. Throughout her career, she has focused on human interaction with unmanned systems, but also focused on manned civilian and military aircraft at Honeywell, Inc. and commercial, consumer and industrial systems at the Eastman Kodak Company. 

Keynote Topic: Human-Robot Teaming Evaluations in Extreme Environments
In this keynote, Prof. Adams will share insights from conducting data collection in real-world extreme environments, where tightly controlled experiments are often not feasible. She will discuss the challenges of working with noisy and sparse data, the absence of convenience samples, and the need for creative and adaptive methodological approaches.

Dražen Brščić is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Informatics at Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. He received his PhD degree from Tokyo University, Tokyo, Japan. He was a Senior Research Assistant at the Institute of Automatic Control Engineering of Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany (from 2008 to 2010). He was a Research Scientist at the Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories (IRC) of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), Kyoto, Japan (from 2011-2016). 

His research focuses on human behaviour sensing, tracking, and modelling in public spaces using multimodal sensing technologies such as depth cameras and 3D LiDARs. He has made significant contributions to socially aware robotics, including pedestrian behaviour modelling, human group interaction analysis, socially adaptive robot navigation, and long-term human–robot interaction in public environments. His work also explores methods for predicting human behaviour to enable safe, natural, and context-aware robot interactions, including assistive behaviours and strategies for mitigating socially disruptive interactions with robots.

Keynote Topic: Moral Interaction with Social robots

Robin Murphy is a professor, science communicator, and award-winning founder of disaster robotics that continues to shape/direct/influence/guide global best practices in how robots are used in disasters. Her ongoing research focuses on the development and application of artificial intelligence in robots used for emergency response, as well as how humans & robots interact in these contexts.

As the pioneer of disaster robotics, Robin has not only worked with ground, aerial, and marine robots and developed their software, but has also been an active field responder in over 30 disasters in 5 countries including the World Trade Center attacks, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Charley, Hurricane Harvey, Fukushima, and the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Greece.

Robin’s contribution extends beyond the four walls of her laboratory. Her research in the field of disaster robotics has informed the policies of the European Union on the use of small UAS for disasters and the National Fire Protection Agency.

Tapomayukh “Tapo” Bhattacharjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University where he directs the EmPRISE Lab. He completed his Ph.D. in Robotics from Georgia Institute of Technology and was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral research associate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He wants to enable robots to assist people with mobility limitations with activities of daily living. His work spans the fields of human-robot interaction, haptic perception, and robot manipulation and focuses on addressing the fundamental research question on how to leverage robot-world physical interactions in unstructured human environments to perform relevant activities of daily living. 

He is the recipient of TRI Young Faculty Researcher Award’24, NSF CAREER Award’23, and his work has won Best Paper Award Finalist at HRI’24, Best Demo Award at HRI’24, Best RoboCup Paper Award at IROS’22, Best Paper Award Finalist and Best Student Paper Award Finalist at IROS’22, Best Technical Advances Paper Award at HRI’19, and Best Demonstration Award at NeurIPS’18. His work has also been featured in many media outlets including the BBC, Reuters, New York Times, IEEE Spectrum, and GeekWire and his robot-assisted feeding work was selected to be one of the best interactive designs of 2019 by Fast Company.

Jess Irons is a Senior Research Scientist at CSIRO with a background in cognitive and experimental psychology. Her research applies principles of human factors to explore the impacts of new technology in the workplace and strategies for effective human-technology collaboration. Jess completed a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Queensland and a postdoc at the Ohio State University.

AJung Moon is an experimental roboticist. She investigates how robots and AI systems influence the way people move, behave, and make decisions in order to inform how we can design and deploy such autonomous intelligent systems more responsibly.

At McGill University, she is the Director of the McGill Responsible Autonomy & Intelligent System Ethics (RAISE) lab. The RAISE lab is an interdisciplinary group that investigates the social and ethical implications of robots and AI systems and explores what it means for engineers to be designing and deploying such systems responsibly for a better, technological future.

She is a Korean-Canadian and based in Montréal, Canada.