Prof. Brian Scassellati, Yale University

Brian Scassellati is a Professor of Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Mechanical Engineering at Yale University and Director of the NSF Expedition on Socially Assistive Robotics. His research focuses on building embodied computational models of human social behavior, especially the developmental progression of early social skills. Using computational modeling and socially interactive robots, his research evaluates models of how infants acquire social skills and assists in the diagnosis and quantification of disorders of social development (such as autism). His other interests include humanoid robots, human-robot interaction, artificial intelligence, machine perception, and social learning. Dr. Scassellati received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. His dissertation work (Foundations for a Theory of Mind for a Humanoid Robot) with Rodney Brooks used models drawn from developmental psychology to build a primitive system for allowing robots to understand people. His work at MIT focused mainly on two well-known humanoid robots named Cog and Kismet. He also holds a Master of Engineering in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (1995), and Bachelors degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (1995) and Brain and Cognitive Science (1995), all from MIT. Dr. Scassellati's research in social robotics and assistive robotics has been recognized within the robotics community, the cognitive science community, and the broader scientific community. He was named an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in 2007 and received an NSF CAREER award in 2003. His work has been awarded five best-paper awards. He was the chairman of the IEEE Autonomous Mental Development Technical Committee from 2006 to 2007, the program chair of the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) in both 2007 and 2008, and the program chair for the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in 2009.

Prof. Adriana Tapus, ENSTA Paris Tech

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 and she is the Program Chair of HRI 2018 conference. She is also involved in many national and EU H2020 international research projects.

Prof. Bram Vanderborght, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Paris Tech

I received the degree in the study of Mechanical Engineering at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2003 with highest distinction. Since 2003 I was researcher at the VUB, supported by the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders (FWO). In May 2007 I received my PhD in Applied. The focus of my research was the use of adaptable compliance of pneumatic artificial muscles in the dynamically balanced biped Lucy. In May-June 2006 I performed research on the humanoids robot HRP-2 at the Joint Japanese/French Robotics Laboratory (JRL) in AIST, Tsukuba (Japan) in the research "Dynamically stepping over large obstacles by the humanoid robot HRP-2". I received a 3-year post-doc grant with mobility grant from the FWO. From October 2007-April 2010 I worked as post-doc researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology in Genova (Italy) on the humanoid robot iCub and compliant actuation. Since October 2009, I am appointed as professor at the VUB where I teach mechatronics and give a robotics project. Since October 2011, I am also research director at the Universitatea Babes-Bolyai, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy with a project on robot assisted therapy with ASD children and VUB-PI of the DREAM project. I received an ERC Starting Grant on Series-Parallel Elastic Actuation for Robotics (SPEAR). I am member of the Young Academy of the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts. My research interests includes cognitive and physical human robot interaction, robot assisted therapy, humanoids and rehabilitation robotics with core technology of using variable impedance actuators.

Prof. Dana Kulic, University of Waterloo

Dana Kulić received the combined B.A.Sc. and M.Eng. degrees in electromechanical engineering, and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of British Columbia, Canada, in 1998 and 2005, respectively. From 2006 to 2009, she was a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow and a Project Assistant Professor at the Nakamura Laboratory at the University of Tokyo. She is currently an Associate Professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She is a founding co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Human Movement Understanding and an Associate Editor with the IEEE Transactions on Robotics. In 2014, she was awarded Ontario’s Early Researcher award for her work on rehabilitation and human-robot interaction. Her research interests include human motion analysis, robot learning, humanoid robots, and human-machine interaction.

Cristina Cosescu, Babes-Bolyai University