Organizers

• Bahar Irfan, University of Plymouth, UK.

Bahar Irfan is an Early-Stage Researcher and a PhD candidate at the Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems, University of Plymouthand SoftBank Robotics Europe, France, in the joint Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN project APRIL. Her work focuses on multi-modal personalization in long-term human-robot interaction, which involves incremental and online learning of users, their behaviours and preferences in customer-oriented service and socially assistive robotics domains.

• Aditi Ramachandran, Vän Robotics, USA

Aditi Ramachandran is the Chief Robot Officer at Van Robotics where she works on building educational robots and oversees all software development at the company. She received a PhD from the Social Robotics Lab at Yale University where her research focused on personalized social robot tutors for children.

• Samuel Spaulding, MIT Media Lab, USA

Samuel Spaulding is a PhD student in the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. His thesis research is focusing on building robots that can learn personalized cognitive and affective models of users over repeated interactions and across different tasks.

• Sinan Kalkan, Middle East Technical University (METU), Turkey, skalkan@ceng.metu.edu.tr.

Dr.Kalkan received his Ph.D. degree from University of Göttingen, Germany and afterwards joined the Dept. of Computer Engineering, METU as a faculty member. Dr. Kalkan’s research interests in robotics include context modeling and life-long learning. His 2016 paper on the subject has received the Outstanding Paper Award by the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems in 2019. Dr.Kalkan has served as the program chair for the 17th International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR2015), co-organized the Lifelong Learning for Long-term HRI workshop at Ro-Man2020, and he is one of the founders and counsel board members of the Turkish Robotics Conferences.

• German I. Parisi, ContinualAI Universität Hamburg, Germany McD Tech Labs, Mountain View,CA, parisi@informatik.uni-hamburg.de.

German I. Parisi is postdoctoral research affiliate of the University of Hamburg, Germany, and the Director of Applied AI at McD Tech Labs in Mountain View, California, a Silicon Valley-based research centre established by McDonald’s Corporation. He is also the co-founder of ContinualAI, the largest research organization on continual learning for AI with a network of over 900 scientists. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. In 2017 he received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Hamburg. In 2015 he was a visiting researcher at the Cognitive Neuro-Robotics Lab of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), South Korea, winners of the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge. His main research interests include human-robot interaction, continual robot learning, and multisensory learning

• Hatice Gunes, University of Cambridge, UK, Hatice.Gunes@cl.cam.ac.uk.

Dr. Gunes is a Reader in Affective Intelligence and Robotics (AFAR) and the Director of the AFAR Lab at the University of Cambridge. Her expertise is in the areas of affective computing and social signal processing cross-fertilizing research in multimodal interaction, computer vision, machine learning and social robotics. She has published over 100 papers in these areas (H-index=32, citations > 5,000) and her research highlights include Best Paper Candidate at IEEE RO-MAN’20, Outstanding Paper Award at IEEE FG’11 and Best Demo Award at IEEE ACII’09. Dr Gunes is the former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing, the General Co-Chair of ACII 2019, and the Program Co-Chair of ACM/IEEE HRI 2020 and IEEE FG 2017.