Organizing Committee

Jauwairia Nasir (jauwairia.nasir@uni-a.de) – Personal Website – Linkedin – Twitter – Google Scholar
University of Augsburg, Germany

Jauwairia Nasir is a postdoctoral fellow at the Chair of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) at University of Augsburg. She did her PhD at the Computer Human Interaction for Learning and Instruction (CHILI) lab at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, in which the Productive Engagement framework was introduced for social robots. During her PhD, she was an EU ITN Horizon 2020 Marie Curie fellow at ANIMATAS. Her research interests broadly include human-machine interaction, social robotics, multimodal behavioral analysis, and machine learning applied in the fields of typical and atypical education and health care. She actively engages in community services as part of conference and workshop organizing committees at venues like HRI, RO-MAN, and HAI; and as a reviewer, PC member, speaker, and a guest editor at various conferences and journal venues. She also serves as the head of initiatives at the WAILabs, part of the global non-profit Women in AI. 

Barbara Bruno (barbara.bruno@kit.edu) – SARAI Lab @ KIT
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany

Barbara Bruno is a Tenure Track W1 Professor on "AI for Autonomous Systems" at the Institute for Anthropomatics and Robotics (IAR) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT, Germany). Barbara's research interests lie in Human-Robot Interaction, Social Robotics and Socially Assistive Robotics. Building on her PhD research, she co-founded the start-up company Teseo, focusing on assistive technologies for older adults and in 2017–2019 was Technical Manager of the H2020 project CARESSES, which developed a culturally-competent care robot for older adults. In 2019-2023, as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland), she contributed to the MSCA ANIMATAS focusing on the development of socially assistive robots for education. Barbara holds an M.Sc. degree and Ph.D. degree in Robotics, both from the University of Genova, Italy. She is currently serving as Associate Editor for the IEEE "Robotics & Automation Letters" journal and the Springer journal on "Intelligent Service Robotics" and has contributed as organiser, invited speaker or panellist to a number of workshops and conferences on assistive robotics, personalised robotics and child-robot interaction. She has published more than 70 articles in international journals and peer-reviewed international conferences.

Utku Norman (utku.norman@kit.edu)  – LinkedIn – Google Scholar
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany

Utku Norman is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS) of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany, where he is dedicated to explore how AI-driven robots can transform social interactions and become integral parts of society. Utku earned his PhD from EPFL in Switzerland, at the Computer-Human Interaction Lab for Learning and Instruction. He was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow in the EU's H2020 Project ANIMATAS, and a visiting scholar in Télécom Paris, France. His doctoral work centered on developing computational models to empower social robots with mutual understanding abilities and  support learning.

Muneeb Imtiaz Ahmad (m.i.ahmad@swansea.ac.uk)
Swansea University (SU), UK

Dr Muneeb Ahmad is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Swansea University’s (SU) Computational Foundry, and his research is situated within the Human-Centred Computing domain and is at the Intersection of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Intelligent Robotics and Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence (AI). His research broadly focuses on employing methods from the field of human-centred computing to create and evaluate intelligent interactive systems such as intelligent robots, and user interfaces that can adapt to users through real-time analysis of their social signals and physiological data. 

Hifza Javed (hifza_javed@honda-ri.com) – LinkedIn

Honda Research Institute USA Inc., USA

Hifza Javed is a Human-Robot Interaction Research Scientist working with Honda Research Institute in San Jose, California. She graduated with an MSc in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Singapore in 2012 and earned a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the George Washington University, Washington D.C. in 2021. Her doctoral research focused on using socially assistive robots to create long term health behavior change in individuals with chronic health conditions, particularly Autism Spectrum Disorder. Her current research investigates the evaluation of interpersonal dynamics in human-human interactions and the use of social mediator robots to influence social dynamics within group settings. Her interests are highly interdisciplinary and lie at the cross-section of affective computing, personalized machine learning, human-robot interaction, socially assistive robotics, and assistive technologies.

Elisabeth André (andre@informatik.uni-augsburg.de)
University of Augsburg, Germany

Elisabeth André is a full professor of Computer Science and Founding Chair of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Augsburg University in Germany. She possesses a substantial amount of experience in organizing large international scientific events on topics related to RO-MAN. Notably, she served as the General Co-Chair of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2018) in Stockholm and as the Program Co-Chair of the International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2015) in Paris. Furthermore, she has actively contributed to the organization of various international workshops and seminars, including the Dagstuhl seminar on "Social Agents for Teamwork and Group Interactions" in 2019 and an upcoming Shonan workshop on "Intelligent Interaction with Autonomous Assistants in the Wild," scheduled for May 2024. Her prominence within the RO-MAN community is underscored by delivering keynote speeches at RO-MAN 2014 in Edinburgh and at RO-MAN 2022 in Naples.