Social Robots in Therapy

• Adriana Tapus (Robotics and Computer Vision Lab, ENSTA-ParisTech):

Adriana TAPUS is a Full Professor at ENSTA-ParisTech since May 2009. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) 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 mainly worked on socially assistive robotics, human sensing, and human-robot interaction. Her main interest is on long-term learning (i.e., in particular in interaction with humans) and on-line robot behavior adaptation to external environmental factors. She received the Romanian Academy Award for her contributions in assistive robotics in 2010. She is Associate Editor of many high-rank journals in robotics, she was the General Chair of ICSR 2015 conference, she is the Program Chair of HRI 2018 conference and General Chair for HRI 2019 conference. In 2016, Prof. Tapus was one of the 25 women in robotics you need to know about, ranking done by Robohub. She is also involved in many national and EU H2020 international research projects.

• Jamy Li (Human Media Interaction, University of Twente):

Jamy Li is an Assistant Professor in the Human-Media Interaction group at the University of Twente. He received his Master degree from the Interactive Design Lab in Toronto in 2008 and his PhD degree from the Department of Communication at Stanford in 2016, where he worked as a Research Assistant at the Center for Design Research. His current research interest is creating interaction design prototypes for robots that help specialized populations, particularly autistic children and individuals with cognitive impairment. He has published in Computers in Human Behavior, HRI, JHRI, IJHCS and IJSR.

• Maartje de Graaf (Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative, Brown University):

Maartje de Graaf is a social and behavioral scientist in the multidisciplinary field of human-robot interaction. Her research is motivated by her intrinsic drive to understand human behavior and its underlying psychological and cognitive processes. Her research interest is on the intersection of interpersonal communication, social and cognitive psychology, and socially interactive technology with a focus on social robots. Her past research indicates a strong impact of human-technology relationships in the emergence of long-term acceptance of social robots in everyday environments. Envisioning a future in which the social abilities of robots can only increase, her research agenda evolves around the social, emotional and cognitive responses from users to robots including the societal and ethical consequences of such responses. The end goal is to influence technology design and policy direction to pursue the development of socially acceptable systems that benefit society.

Maartje has joined Brown’s Humanity Centered Robotics Initiative with a Rubicon grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Her current research project aims to investigate the underlying psychological and cognitive processes of how people explain both human and robot behavior. Before starting at Brown University, Maartje was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Communication Science at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. Maartje has a Bachelor of Business Administration in Communication Management (2005), a Master of Science in Communication Studies (2011), and a PhD in Human-Robot Interaction (2015).

• Jenay Beer (Institute of Gerontology, University of Georgia):

Dr. Beer has a background in Engineering Psychology, which is the study of the design, evaluation, and implementation of technology for human use. Dr. Beer researches assistive technology to assist older adults maintain their independence and age-in-place. Her work focuses on human-robot interaction, telehealth, and technology acceptance/adoption.