The Furhat Conference – creators edition

Ian Bernstein is currently the Head of Product and Engineering at Titan Space Technologies. Prior to Titan, Ian served as Founder and Head of Product at Misty Robotics, a spin-off company from Sphero, Inc. focused on building platform robots for the home and front-of-business. Before the spin-off, Ian served as Co-Founder and CTO at Sphero which has shipped more than 4 million robots to date including the app-controlled Sphero Star Wars BB-8. Ian studied Electrical Engineering at Colorado State University.

Arushi is part of the AI advisory and implementation team at Kyndryl. She has a decade of industry experience in the software engineering and data science fields. Her focus in current role is in business problem solving by usage of data and adoption of innovative technologies.

Arushi has been working on integrating Furhat robots with some of the chatbot technologies to deliver some client specific use cases.

Benjamin works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Norwegian Center for AI Innovation at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Previously, he obtained a PhD at the Technische Universität Berlin for his research on context-aware news personalization.

His research interests include personalization, natural language processing, and applied machine learning. Together with his colleagues at NorwAI, he develops generative language models for Norwegian. The field of social robotics presents an exciting domain to showcase applications and uses of such models.

Léa is a Doctoral student at the company ATOS in France and at the Cognitive Robotics, Interactive Systems, & Speech Processing division of Gipsa-lab in Grenoble, France.

Her research focuses on attention management in multi-party interactions for a social robot. She is currently working on the generation of gaze and head movements for a robot animating a collaborative game.

Ella Velner is a PhD student at the University of Twente (UTwente). She holds a MSc in Information Systems from the University of Amsterdam in 2019. Prior to that, she obtained a BA in Communication and Information Sciences from the VU Amsterdam. Her PhD focuses on responsible child-robot interaction, with a special interest in voice (of the robot as well as the child) and trust.

Thomas Beelen is a PhD student at UTwente. He obtained his master’s degree in Human Computer Interaction & Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and UTwente, and has a BSc in Creative Technology from UTwente. His PhD is on child-robot interaction with a focus on eliciting child speech on their information needs during conversational search.