Organisers

Frank Foerster is Senior Lecturer at the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, a member of the Robotics Research Group, and affiliated with the Adaptive Systems Research Group. He has conducted research in developmental robotics and human-robot interaction with interests in language acquisition, symbol grounding, and more generally, the coordination mechanisms that underlie human (and robot) interaction. His Ph.D. focused on the acquisition of linguistic negation (as part of the ITALK project). He has worked as a software integrator at the MMV lab of Queen Mary University within the REVERIE project, and as a research fellow within the HRI-BioPsy project investigating the ability of humanoid robots to trigger motor resonance in humans as well as the relationship between motor resonance and trust.  Prior to his current position as Senior Lecturer, he worked as a postdoctoral research associate on the Turing project on intuitive human-robot interaction in work environments at Queen Mary's Centre for  Advanced Robotics (ARQ).

Frank is currently Co-I on the EPSRC project FLUIDITY where he will investigate how to render robotic speech interfaces more fluid and intuitive by considering (multimodal) repair, and the role of negation words within these, amongst other mechanisms.

Dr Marta Romeo is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department in the School of MACS (Mathematical and Computer Sciences) at Heriot-Watt University and a member of the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. Her research focuses on developing socially intelligent robots, adapting and personalising to their users for an increased acceptability and usability. She is interested in human-robot interaction, social robotics, affective computing, health and well-being. She got her bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering of Computing Systems at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and she moved to the UK to pursue a Ph.D. in Computer Science. She got her Ph.D. in 2020 from the University of Manchester on human-robot interaction and deep learning for companionship in elderly care, working in the H2020 Project MoveCare (Multiple-Actors Virtual Empathic Caregiver for the Elder). She then stayed at the University of Manchester as a postdoc (2020-2022) for the UKRI Node on Trust, working on how trust in human-robot interaction is built, maintained and possibly recovered when lost.

Patrick is a Senior Research Fellow in the Adaptive Systems Research Group and manager of the Robot House at the University of Hertfordshire (UK). He is also a visiting Lecturer at the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science. His research revolves around social robotics and focuses on nonverbal intgeractive signals, social credibility and trust in assistive and companion robots. He is further interested in interaction architectures and behaviour coordination as well as systems integration in heterogeneous environments. Patrick is currently a CoI of the UKRI TAS hub's pump priming project Kaspar explains and an advisory board member of the Norwegian project Human Interactive Robotics in Healthcare (HIRo). He was also a CoI of the AAIP funded feasibility project Assuring safety and social credibility. Previously, he been a postdoctoral researcher in the Robot House 2.0 project, an EPSRC strategic equipment grant, and in the Cognitive Service Robotics Apartment, a large-scale project within the DFG-funded excellence cluster CITEC where he was a member of the Cognitive Systems Engineering group. Patrick received his Ph.D. on the topic of an Integrated concept of spatial awareness which originates from research conducted in the Applied Informatics group and SFB 673 Alignment in Communication at Bielefeld University where he also received a master's and a bachelor's degree in computer science.

Marisé is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University.  She has a multi-disciplinary profile with a background in Computer Science, Engineering, and Human Factors. She is interested in robotics, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and applications of Machine Learning (ML) in those areas. She is currently co-chair of the Early Career Forum of the UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems Nework (UK-RAS).

Marisé's research involves educational robots, industrial robots, and other, mainly embodied, Autonomous Systems, exploring trust in these systems, as well as control interfaces and novel ways of interaction that could improve the accessibility and inclusiveness of these technologies. For this, she has a strong focus on direct co-research and co-design with end-users.

Prior to her current role she worked as a Lecturer  in Computer Science at the University of Lincoln, where she is currently an Associate member of the Interactive Technologies Lab (IntLab), the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems (L-CAS), and the Autism Research Innovation Centre (ARIC). Before this, she worked as Researcher in the Mixed Reality Lab and the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (TAS) Hub at the University of Nottingham, where she is also an Associate member.

Joel Fischer is a full Professor at the School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, UK, where he is a member of the Mixed Reality Lab. His research takes a human-centred view on AI-infused technologies to understand and support human activities and reasoning. His research approach is multidisciplinary, drawing on ethnography, participatory design, prototyping, and studies of technology deployments, often with an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic lens. He is currently Co-Investigator and Research Director on the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems TAS Hub and a Co-I on the Horizon Digital Economy centre on “Trusted Data-Driven Products”. 

His research has been published in over 80 publications in leading conferences and journals in HCI (e.g., CHI, ToCHI, CSCW, UbiComp) and AI (e.g., AAMAS, IJCAI, JAIR), and has been awarded Best Paper awards at CHI 2011, CHI 2013, AAMAS 2015, CHI 2018, and CUI 2019. He has previously done research at Fraunhofer Germany and interned at (formerly Xerox) PARC in the US. He has obtained his PhD in 2011 from the University of Nottingham. 

Birthe Nesset is currently working on a PhD on the topic: trust in Human-Robot Interactions as part of the UKRI Tast Node on Trust project. She is especially interested in non verbal communication in relation to robot failure ('where failure is more interesting that success').

She is co-supervised by Prof Helen Hastie (Department of Computer Science, Heriot-Watt University).

She previously completed a B.Eng. in Electrical engineering focusing on Industrial Automation at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Birthe is currently doing an introduction study in Psychology at NTNU simultaneously with the PhD. She has completed a MSc. in Human-Robot Interaction, focusing on transparency and its effect on trust in HRI.

Christian is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University. He finished his PhD in Computer Science in 2016 at the University of Lincoln, UK as part of the STRANDS FP7 EU project concerned with long-term autonomy for mobile robots. Christian's thesis focused on human-aware navigation in ever-changing human-populated environments and how qualitative spatial relations can be used to abstract from the metric world in order to achieve robust navigation approaches. Before that,  received the Diplom degree (equivalent to a combined BSc and MSc) in computer science in the natural sciences from Bielefeld University (Germany) in 2012. Christian's thesis involved developmental robotics and speech recognition, focusing on human-robot interaction in tutoring scenarios. Before his employment as an Assistant Professor, Christian was a Research Fellow at the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK and involved in the MuMMER H2020 EU project creating a social robot for a shopping mall in Finland working on the combination of dialogue and physical actions. He currently continues this work to create a NLP system for a social robot as Co-I of the SPRING H2020 EU project.