Dr. Melanie Jouaiti
Organizer
Melanie Jouaiti got her PhD at Loria, Nancy, France where she worked on developing bio-inspired controllers to achieve motor coordination in robots and applied her work to robot-assisted therapy with children with ASD. After a PostDoc at Loria, Nancy, France, she joined the SIRRL lab at the University of Waterloo. Her interests include robot-assisted therapy, assistive robotics, and machine learning.
Dr. Sera Buyukgoz
Co-organizer
Sera Buyukgoz is a robotics researcher at SoftBank Robotics and PhD student in ISIR at Sorbonne Université. She is a marie-curie fellow as a part of the european union horizon 2020 ITN project called ANIMATAS. Her current research focuses on generating proactive robot behaviors that aimed to assist human.
Eloïse Zehnder
Co-organizer
Eloïse Zehnder is a psychology PhD student at the University of Lorraine and Inria, in France. Her work aims at understanding the links between acceptance and trust towards companion robots for lonely people.
Steven Lawrence
Site manager & Technical help
Steven is a MMath student in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science program at UWaterloo. His work aims at understanding how subjective norms may be used for adaptable behaviour in assistive robots.
Dr. Amir Aly
Co-organizer
Amir Aly is a lecturer (assistant professor) in Artificial Intelligence and robotics at the University of Plymouth UK. Prior to his position he worked in different countries as a research scientist such as Japan and France. He has wide research interests and activities in human-robot interaction, cognitive and developmental robotics, and AI. He is also serving as an associate editor for prestigious journals (IEEE TCDS) and conferences (IROS), and an organizer for several others.
Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn
Co-organizer
Kerstin Dautenhahn, IEEE Fellow is Canada 150 Research Chair in Intelligent Robotics at University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She has a joint appointment with the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Systems Design Engineering and is cross-appointed with the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at University of Waterloo. In Waterloo she directs the Social and Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. Her research areas are social robotics, human-robot interaction, assistive robotics, cognitive and developmental robotics.