Keynote Speakers

Arvid Kappas (Constructor University, Germany) 

Arvid Kappas is professor of psychology and Dean at Constructor University Bremen. He has been conducting research on emotions for over three decades. Having obtained his PhD at Dartmouth College, NH, USA, he has lived and worked in Switzerland, Canada, the UK, and in Germany. He was also visiting professor in Austria and in Italy.

His research interests relate to how factors, such as the social context, or certain cognitive processes, influence how components of the emotion system interact, such as what people feel, what expressions they show, and how their body react. He believes that emotion and regulation are best considered together. Empirical research is targeted at basic processes as well as applications, particularly in the context of affective computing and social robotics.

Kappas has been associate editor of the APA journal Emotion and of Biological Psychology and has been serving for many years on the editorial board of several journals, such as Cognition and Emotion and Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. He was member of the the steering committee of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing as well as executive board of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing and the International Society for Research on Emotion. Arvid has been active in a number of national and international scientific associations and published numerous scientific articles and chapters. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science as well as of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. From 2013-2018 he was President of the International Society for Research on Emotions. 

His current research includes work in the context of three recent EU funded projects: "CYBEREMOTIONS: Collective emotions in cyberspace" , "eCUTE: Education in Cultural Understanding Technology Enhanced", as well as "EMOTE : EMbOdied-perceptive Tutors for Empathy-based learning" as well as the ANIMATAS network. Since 2022 he is is pursuing the project RECONSTRUCTING THE NAÏVE THEORY OF THE SELF funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Mauro Dragone (Heriot-Watt University, UK)

Mauro Dragone is Associate Professor in the School of Engineering and Physical Science. Dr. Dragone has worked in EU projects in the area of Internet of Things (IoT) for smart environments, before leading the EU FP7 project RUBICON (Robotic UBIquitous Cognitive Network, FP7-ICT-269914, 2011-2014), a 2.5 million EUR project that has posed the foundations for self-adaptive robotic systems for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications.

At Heriot-Watt, Dr. Dragone set up the Robotic Assisted Living Testbed (RALT), a ‘Living-Lab” designed to facilitate user-driven design and testing of innovative and more practical solutions for healthy ageing and independent living by harnessing IoT and Robotic technologies working together. He has also initiated the Cognitive Assistive Robotic Enviroment (CARE) group, with a focus on enabling IoT and robotic, autonomous and interactive systems (RAIS) to provide user-centred assisted living support. He is currently involved in EU coordination actions developing new benchmarks for assistive robots (METRICS/HEART-MET), and he is one of the co-investigators of the EPSRC Healthcare NetworkPlus EMERGENCE, developing the UK roadmap for assistive robotics for frailty. His current research activities include cloud-robotics, tele-presence robotics, and integration of robot technology in smart homes to assess and assist people living with conditions such as dementia and frailty.

Adriana Tapus (Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France)

Adriana Tapus is Full Professor in the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Lab in the Computer Science and System Engineering Department (U2IS), at ENSTA-ParisTech, France. In 2011, she obtained the French Habilitation (HDR) for her thesis entitled “Towards Personalized Human-Robot Interaction”. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland in 2005 and her degree of Engineer in Computer Science and Engineering from Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania in 2001. She worked as an Associate Researcher at the University of Southern California (USC), where she was among the pioneers on the development of socially assistive robotics, also participating to activity in machine learning, human sensing, and human-robot interaction. Her main interests are on long-term learning (i.e. in particular in interaction with humans), human modeling, and on-line robot behavior adaptation to external environmental factors. Prof. Tapus is an Associate Editor for International Journal of Social Robotics (IJSR), ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), and IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS) and in the steering committee of several major robotics conferences (General Chair 2019 of HRI, Program Chair 2018 of HRI, General Chair 2017 of ECMR). She has more than 150 research publications and she received the Romanian Academy Award for her contributions in assistive robotics in 2010.  She was elected in 2016 as one of the 25 women in robotics you need to know about. She's also the PI of various EU and French National research grants.