KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Bios and pictures are tentative and might be updated.
Andrea Bajcsy
Andrea Bajcsy is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from UC Berkeley. She works at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and human-AI interaction. Her research develops theoretical frameworks and practical algorithms for autonomous robots to safely interact with people, in applications such as personal robotic manipulators, quadrotors, and autonomous vehicles. Her work is funded by the NSF and has been featured in NBC news, WIRED magazine, and the Robohub podcast. She is the recipient of an Honorable Mention for the T-RO Best Paper Award, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship, and worked at NVIDIA Research and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.
Stefanos Nikolaidis
Stefanos Nikolaidis is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and the Fluor Early Career Chair at the University of Southern California, where he leads the Interactive and Collaborative Autonomous Robotics Systems (ICAROS) lab. His research draws upon expertise on artificial intelligence, procedural content generation and quality diversity optimization and leads to end-to-end solutions that enable deployed robotic systems to act robustly when interacting with people in practical, real-world applications.
Stefanos completed his PhD at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and received an MS from MIT, a MEng from the University of Tokyo and a BS from the National Technical University of Athens. In 2022, Stefanos was the sole recipient of the Agilent Early Career Professor Award for his work on human-robot collaboration, as well as the recipient of an NSF CAREER award for his work on “Enhancing the Robustness of Human-Robot Interactions via Automatic Scenario Generation.” His research has also been recognized with best paper awards and nominations from the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, and the International Symposium on Robotics.
Missy Cummings
Professor Mary (Missy) Cummings received her B.S. in Mathematics from the US Naval Academy in 1988, her M.S. in Space Systems Engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1994, and her Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2004. A naval officer and military pilot from 1988-1999, she was one of the U.S. Navy's first female fighter pilots. She is a Professor in the George Mason University College of Engineering and Computing, and directs the Mason Responsible AI program as well as the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center (MARC). She is an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and a Royal Aeronautical Society Fellow, and recently served as the senior safety advisor to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Harold Soh
Harold Soh is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore, where he leads the Collaborative Learning and Adaptive Robots (CLeAR) group. He completed his Ph.D. at Imperial College London, focusing on online learning for assistive robots. Harold's research primarily involves machine learning, particularly generative AI, and decision-making in trustworthy collaborative robots.
His contributions have been recognized with a R:SS Early Career Spotlight in 2023, best paper awards at IROS'21 and T-AFFC'21, and several nominations (R:SS'18, HRI'18, RecSys'18, IROS'12). Harold has played significant roles in the HRI community, most recently as co-Program Chair of ACM/IEEE HRI'24. He is an Associate Editor for the ACM Transactions on Human Robot Interaction, Robotics Automation and Letters (RA-L), and the International Journal on Robotics Research (IJRR).