• Adriana Tapus, ENSTA-ParisTech, France

Adriana Tapus is a 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. 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.

• Tony Belpaeme, Ghent University, Belgium and Plymouth University, UK

Tony Belpaeme is Professor at Ghent University and Professor of Cognitive Systems and Robotics at Plymouth University. He is a member of IDLab – imec at Ghent and is associated with the Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems at Plymouth. His research interests include social systems, cognitive robotics, and artificial intelligence in general.

• Takayuki Kanda, Kyoto University, Japan

Takayuki Kanda is a Professor in Kyoto University, Japan and a Visiting Group Leader in Intelligent Robotics and Communications Laboratory, ATR. 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.

• Hae Won Park, MIT Media Lab Personal Robots Group, USA

Hae Won Park is a Research Scientist at the Personal Robots Group directed by Prof. Cynthia Breazeal at MIT Media Lab. Before, She was a PhD student at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM) at Georgia Tech, where Hae Won was a member of the Human-Automation Systems (HumAnS) Laboratory advised by Prof. Ayanna Howard. While doing her PhD, Hae Won co-founded Zyrobotics, a spin-off from Georgia Tech that is licensing the three patents from her research.