Keynote Speakers
Hatice Gunes, University of Cambridge, UK
Hatice Gunes is a Full Professor of Affective Intelligence and Robotics (AFAR), Director of the AFAR Lab and an Associate Director of the Centre for Human Inspired Artificial Intelligence (CHIA) at the University of Cambridge. Her research advances multimodal, social, and affective intelligence for AI systems, particularly embodied agents and robots, by cross-fertilizing research in the fields of Machine Learning, Affective Computing, Social Signal Processing, and Human Nonverbal Behaviour Understanding, with a strong focus on wellbeing, ethics, fairness and explainability. She has published over 190 papers in these areas (H-index=48, citations > 11,200) and has been named among the “World’s Top 2% Scientists” in her area by Stanford University in Elsevier since the inception of this ranking in 2020. Prof Gunes’ research has received many honours and awards, including being named an Honouree for the Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature 2025, Recipient of the KROS Interdisciplinary Research Award in Social Human-Robot Interaction at IEEE RO-MAN’25, Finalist for the Best Paper Award & Best Student Paper Awards at IEEE RO-MAN’25, Finalist for the Outstanding Women in Robotics & Automation Paper Awards at IEEE ICRA’25, Finalist for the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE FG’24, Recipient of the Best Paper Award in Responsible Affective Computing at ACII’23, Finalist for the RSJ/KROS Distinguished Interdisciplinary Research Award at IEEE RO-MAN’21, Finalist for the Best Paper Award at IEEE RO-MAN’20, Finalist for the 2018 Frontiers Spotlight Award, Recipient of both the Outstanding Paper Award at IEEE FG’11 and Best Demo Award at IEEE ACII’09.
https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/people/hg410
Jean Oh, Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Jean Oh is an Associate Research Professor and Director of roBot Intelligence Group (BIG) at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Jean’s research goal is to create robots that can co-exist and collaborate with humans in shared environments, continuously learning to improve themselves over time through training, exploration, and interaction. Jean’s work on Creative Physical AI aims at reminding us of “what makes us human,” promoting humanity such as safety, creativity, and compassion. Jean’s works on social navigation and interdisciplinary research connecting arts and robotics (FRIDA) have won numerous best paper awards at various robotics conferences such as IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), and featured in international media including New York Times, CNET, Arirang TV, ABC, CBS, and KBS. Jean received a PhD from CMU, MS from Columbia University, and BS from Yonsei University. Jean is the founder of Lavoro AI where she brings her creative, safe, and compassionate AI and Robotics innovations to market.
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jeanoh
Nicolas Heess, Google DeepMind, UK
Nicolas Heess is a Research Scientist (Director) at Google DeepMind, London. His research is focused on bringing AI to the physical world to create the next generation of general purpose robots. His current work lies at the intersection of perception, reasoning, motor control and robotics. Nicolas has a broad interest in many areas of AI and machine learning and, beyond robotics, has made contributions to the theory and applications of reinforcement learning, unsupervised learning, probabilistic models and inference, multi-agent systems, large multimodal models and more. Prior to joining Google DeepMind Nicolas was a postdoctoral researcher at the Gatsby Unit (University College London). He completed his PhD and a MSc in neuroinformatics at the University of Edinburgh, a MSc in neuroscience at the University of Oxford and a BSc in software engineering at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute of the University of Potsdam. Nicolas is an ELLIS Fellow and Honorary Professor at University College London.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=79k7bGEAAAAJ&hl=en