PANELISTS
Bios and pictures are tentative and might be updated.
Leila Takayama
Leila Takayama is a Human-Robot Interaction Specialist with over a decade of professional experience in applying social science concepts and methods to the design of robotic systems. At Hoku Labs, she translates human-robot interaction research into actionable recommendations for the design of robotic products and services.
Her clients include Fortune 100 companies, tech startups, and non-profit organizations. She has contributed to over a dozen robot products that have shipped, including drones in the air; industrial, service, and consumer robots on the ground; and uncrewed robotic systems in the ocean. The people who interact with those robots include everyone from professional robot operators to minimally informed customers to completely untrained bystanders. To do these projects, Leila most often collaborate with engineering, design, product, operations, and executive teams. From 2016-2022, Dr. Takayama worked as a Professor at UC Santa Cruz, earning tenure in 2018. Prior to joining the UC Santa Cruz faculty, she was a senior user experience researcher at GoogleX, a lab that aims for moonshots in technology and science. Prior to joining GoogleX, she was a research scientist and area manager for human-robot interaction at Willow Garage.
Maria Luce Lupetti
Maria Luce Lupetti is an Assistant Professor in Interaction and Critical Design at the Department of Architecture and Design at Politecnico di Torino (IT). Her research is concerned with all matters of human entanglement with the artificial world, especially concerning complex technologies such as AI and robotics. She also serves as Exhibit X section editor for Interactions Mag.
Previously, she was an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at TU Delft (NL), where she was also a core member of the AiTech Initiative on Meaningful Human Control over AI Systems and a member of the Automated Mobility Lab.
Maria Luce holds a BA in Industrial Design from ISIA Roma Design, a MSc in Ecodesign (M.Sc.) and a PhD in Production, Management and Design from Politecnico di Torino, in Italy. During her doctoral studies on child-robot playful interactions, which was funded by Telecom Italia, she was also a visiting research fellow at Haipeng Mi Lab, at the Academy of Art and Design, Tsinghua University, China. After her doctoral studies, she was a postdoctoral research fellow also at TU Delft, The Netherlands.
Morteza Lahijanian
Morteza Lahijanian is an assistant professor in the Aerospace Engineering Sciences department, an affiliated faculty at the Computer Science department and Robotics program, and the director of the Assured, Reliable, and Interactive Autonomous (ARIA) Systems group at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received a B.S. in Bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley and a PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Boston University. He served as a postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at Rice University. Prior to joining CU Boulder, he was a research scientist in the department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford.
His awards include Outstanding Junior Faculty, Ella Mae Lawrence R. Quarles Physical Science Achievement Award, Jack White Engineering Physics Award, NSF GK-12 Fellowship, and Wadham College Research Fellowship. Dr. Lahijanian's research interests span the areas of control theory, stochastic hybrid systems, formal methods, machine learning, and game theory with applications in robotics, particularly, motion planning, strategy synthesis, model checking, and human-robot interaction. His lab develops novel theoretical foundations and computational frameworks to enable reliable and intelligent autonomy. The emphasis is especially on safe autonomy through correct-by-construction algorithmic approaches.
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.
Malte Jung
Malte Jung is an Associate Professor in Information Science at Cornell University and the Nancy H. ’62 and Philip M. ’62 Young Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow.
His research seeks to build understanding about interpersonal dynamics in groups and teams and how those can be shaped by machines. He leads the Robots in Groups Lab, which focuses on design and behavioral aspects of human-robot interaction in group and team settings.
Jeremy Marvel
Jeremy A. Marvel is a research scientist and project leader at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, MD. Dr. Marvel received the bachelor's degree in computer science from Boston University, Boston, MA, the master's degree in computer science from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, and the Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH. Prior to NIST, Dr. Marvel was a research scientist at the Institute for Research in Engineering and Applied Physics at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD. He joined the Intelligent Systems Division at NIST in 2012.
His research interests include intelligent and adaptive solutions for robot applications, with particular attention paid to human-robot and robot-robot collaborations, multirobot coordination, industrial robot safety, machine learning, perception, and automated parameter optimization. Dr. Marvel currently leads a team of scientists and engineers in metrology efforts at NIST toward collaborative robot performance, and developing tools to enable small and medium-sized enterprises to effectively deploy robot solutions.