Keynote Speakers
Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn, University of Waterloo
Since August 2018 Kerstin Dautenhahn has been Canada 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics at University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She is a member of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She is cross-appointed with the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering, and the Department of Systems Design Engineering at University of Waterloo. She is Visiting Professor at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. In Waterloo she is director of Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory (SIRRL). The main areas of her research are Human-Robot Interaction, Social Robotics, Assistive Technology and Health Technologies. She is Editor in Chief (jointly with Prof. Angelo Cangelosi - University of Manchester, UK) of the Journal Interaction Studies- Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems published by John Benjamins Publishing Company, Editorial Board Member of Adaptive Behavior, Sage Publications, Associate Editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics, published by Springer, and Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems. She is an Editor of the book series Advances in Interaction Studies, published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. Prof. Dautenhahn is on the Advisory Board of the journal AI and Society (Springer). She is an IEEE Fellow, member of ACM, and a Lifelong Fellow of AISB, as well as a member of the Executive Board of the International Foundation for Responsible Robotics. Since 2006 she has been part of the Standing Steering Committee of the IEEE conference RO-MAN (Human and Robot Interactive Communication).
Prof. Rafael A Calvo, Imperial College
Rafael A. Calvo, PhD (2000) is Professor and Director of Research at the Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London. He is also co-lead at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and co-editor of the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society. He is director of the Wellbeing Technology Lab that focuses on the design of systems that support wellbeing in areas of mental health, medicine and education. A keen player in the push for more ethical technology design, Rafael is a member of the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, a part of the UN’s AI for Good Global Summit, and in 2019 will joined the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He is the recipient of five teaching awards, and published four books and over 200 articles in the fields of HCI, wellbeing-supportive design, learning technologies, affective computing, and computational intelligence. His books include Positive Computing: Technology for Wellbeing and Human Potential (MIT Press) and the Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing. He has worked globally at Universities, high schools and professional training institutions including the Language Technology Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Universidad Nacional de Rosario, and on sabbaticals at the University of Cambridge and the University of Memphis. Rafael has also worked as a technology consultant for projects in the US, Brasil, Argentina and Australia. He is Associate Editor for the Journal of Medical Internet Research – Human Factors (JMIR-HF) and former Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies and IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. He has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence applied to automatic document classification and has also worked at Carnegie Mellon University, Universidad Nacional de Rosario, and as a consultant for projects worldwide.
Prof. Emilia Barakova, Eindhoven University of Technology
Emilia Barakova is Assistant Professor of Socially Intelligent Systems at Eindhoven University of Technology. She is the head of the Social Robotics Lab, leader of the Physical and Social Rehabilitation educational squad, and an editor of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Associate Editor of International Journal of Social Robotics and Journal of Integrative Neuroscience. Barakova is an expert in the field of embodied social interaction with and through technology, social, cognitive and brain-inspired robotics, modeling expressiveness of movement and designing technologies for individuals in social isolation and special needs groups. She has specialized in combining methods from neuro- and cognitive sciences, robotics, and computational intelligence to model social behavior. Several of her research projects focus on children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), elderly with dementia, and embodying emotions and intelligence in robots. Barakova has organized three international conferences (1 ACM, 2 IEEE), has co-edited 7 special issues in journals with an average impact factor of 2.595, has been invited as Keynote speaker at many international conferences. She has served as an intermediate director of German-Japanese Research Lab in Japan. After obtaining a Master diploma from Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria, Emilia Barakova worked as a researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Science before going on to do her PhD research into artificial intelligence at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Since then, she has held several research positions at GMD-Japan Research lan and RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. She returned to the Netherlands in 2006, taking up a position at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), as Assistant Professor. She has made her interest in social robots into a cornerstone of her research at TU/e.