Organisers

Frank Foerster is Senior lecturer at the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, and a member of 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.

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.

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.

Joel Fischer is an associate 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.

Marta Romeo is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Cognitive Robotics Lab, at the University of Manchester (UK). She recently completed her Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Angelo Cangelosi on Deep Learning for Human–Robot Interaction in Elderly Care. Her research focuses on human–robot interaction, with particular emphasis on evaluating the possibility of using deep learning methods to improve personalisation for social robots. In particular, on how to adapt the communication between social robots and their diverse users. Her current work is focused on trust and trustworthy human–robot interaction, within the UKRI TAS Node on Trust.

Luke is currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire, teaching undergraduate and post graduate students in a range of subjects including programming, robotics and artificial intelligence. Prior to this Luke worked as a Research Fellow in robotics on the Horizon 2020 BabyRobot project (grant number: 687831) and Kaspar project. This role involved designing and producing 20 humanoid robots, each of which has 22 degrees of freedom (DOF) and 18 force-sensing resistors (FSR), to facilitate tactile interaction, along with designing and running studies. Skills and experience include: HCI, HRI, CAD design, 3D printing, programming, technical writing, study design and public speaking.