Prof. Adriana Tapus is Full Professor in the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Lab in the Computer Science and System Engineering Department (U2IS), at ENSTA-ParisTech, France. In 2011, she obtained the French Habilitation (HDR) for her thesis entitled “Towards Personalized Human-Robot Interaction”. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland 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 was among the pioneers on the development of socially assistive robotics, also participating to activity in machine learning, human sensing, and human-robot interaction. Her main interests are on long-term learning (i.e. in particular in interaction with humans), human modeling, and on-line robot behavior adaptation to external environmental factors. Prof. Tapus is an Associate Editor for International Journal of Social Robotics (IJSR), ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI), and IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS) and in the steering committee of several major robotics conferences (General Chair 2019 of HRI, Program Chair 2018 of HRI, General Chair 2017 of ECMR). She has more than 150 research publications and she received the Romanian Academy Award for her contributions in assistive robotics in 2010. She was elected in 2016 as one of the 25 women in robotics you need to know about. She's also the PI of various EU and French National research grants.

Dr. Takayuki Kanda is a professor in Informatics at Kyoto University, Japan. He is also a Visiting Group Leader at ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, Kyoto, Japan. He received his B. Eng, M. Eng, and Ph. D. degrees in computer science from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1998, 2000, and 2003, respectively. He is one of the starting members of Communication Robots project at ATR. He has developed a communication robot, Robovie, and applied it in daily situations, such as peer-tutor at elementary school and a museum exhibit guide. His research interests include human-robot interaction, interactive humanoid robots, and field trials.

Astrid Jackson is a software engineer at the Toyota Research Institute in California where she is conducting research focused on solving machine learning problems arising in shared autonomy in Robotics. She has an undergraduate degree in Computational Visualistics from the University of Koblenz in Germany, a M.S. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Georgia in Athens, USA and is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, USA. Prior to pursuing a research career she worked at Electronic Arts as a software engineer developing several AAA gaming titles.

David Sirkin is the Executive Director for Interaction Design at Stanford University's Center for Design Research and a Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering. His research on the design of physical interactions between humans and robots, and on autonomous vehicles and their interfaces, has been covered by the Associated Press, the Economist, New Scientist, San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post. His teaching includes design theory, user-centered design methods, and interactive device design. David grew up in Florida, near the Everglades, and in Maine, near the lobsters.

Dr. Henny Admoni is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads the Human And Robot Partners (HARP) Lab. Henny studies how to develop intelligent robots that can assist and collaborate with humans on complex tasks like preparing a meal. She is most interested in how natural human communication, like where someone is looking, can reveal underlying intentions and can be used to improve human-robot interactions. Henny holds a BA in Computational Cognitive Science and an MA in Computer Science, both from Wesleyan University, as well as a PhD in Computer Science from Yale University. She was a postdoc in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University prior to becoming a professor there. Her research has been supported by the US National Science Foundation, the US Office of Naval Research, the Paralyzed Veterans of America Foundation, and Sony Corporation. Her work has been featured by the media such as NPR's Science Friday, Voice of America News, and WESA radio.

Dr. Dylan Glas is a roboticist and researcher with over a decade of experience in the field of social human-robot interaction. He was a Guest Associate Professor at Osaka University and a Group Leader and Senior Researcher at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) in Kyoto, Japan, where he developed frameworks and algorithms for multimodal perception, machine learning, and autonomous behavior generation for a variety of humanoid social robots, including Robovie and the android ERICA. He obtained his undergraduate and Master's degrees at MIT, where he worked in the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media lab. Since 2017 he has been working in industry, as Senior Robotics Software Architect at Futurewei Technologies in San Francisco.