Tapomayukh ''Tapo'' Bhattacharjee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University where he directs the EmPRISE Lab (https://emprise.cs.cornell.edu/). He completed his Ph.D. in Robotics from Georgia Institute of Technology and was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral research associate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. He wants to enable robots to assist people with mobility limitations with activities of daily living. His work spans the fields of human-robot interaction, haptic perception, and robot manipulation and focuses on addressing the fundamental research question on how to leverage robot-world physical interactions in unstructured human environments to perform relevant activities of daily living. He is the recipient of NSF CAREER Award’23 and his work has won Best RoboCup Paper Award at IROS’22, Best Paper Award Finalist and Best Student Paper Award Finalist at IROS’22, Best Technical Advances Paper Award at HRI'19, and Best Demonstration Award at NeurIPS’18. His work has also been featured in many media outlets including the BBC, Reuters, New York Times, IEEE Spectrum, and GeekWire and his robot-assisted feeding work was selected to be one of the best interactive designs of 2019 by Fast Company.

Kerstin Fischer is professor for Language and Technology Interaction at the University of Southern Denmark and director of the Human-Robot Interaction Lab in Sonderborg. Kerstin is senior associate editor of the journal ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction and associate editor of the book series ‘Studies in Pragmatics’ (Brill). She has written 3 monographs, 35 journal articles and more than 100 conference papers, in which she brings her background in linguistics, communication and multimodal interaction analysis to the study of behavior change, persuasive technology and human-robot interaction.