Furhat Conference on Social Robots in Research

Samer Al Moubayed is Co-founder & CEO at Furhat Robotics. He is also an Affiliate Faculty at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, from which he holds a PhD in Speech Technology and a Masters degree in AI and Language. Samer started Furhat Robotics with colleagues from the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, one of the worlds most renowned institutes that has been advancing the area of conversational AI and interactive characters over the last 4 decades.

Prof. Roger K. Moore is Chair of Spoken Language Processing at the University of Sheffield, as well as Visiting Chair at Bristol Robotics Laboratory and University College London. Prof. Moore has over 40 years experience in Speech Technology R&D and was Head of the UK Government’s Speech Research Unit from 1985 to 1999, where he was responsible for the development of the Aurix range of products and the formation of 20/20 Speech Ltd. He is a past President of the International Speech Communication Association, and in 2017 he organised the first international workshop on ‘Vocal Interactivity in-and-between Humans, Animals and Robots (VIHAR)’.

Sarah is a Ph.D. student at the division of Robotics, Perception and Learning at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Sarah’s research aims to answer whether we could make use of social robots to help us overcome the phenomenon of in-group favoritism and improve the quality of social interaction in everyday groups. Her research goal is to use social robots to support and improve human group interactions.

Ronald is a Doctoral Student at the division of Speech, Music and Hearing at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. He obtained a Master’s degree in Mechanical and Control Engineering from the Delft University of Technology. His research focuses on social robots used for educational purposes, in particular second language learning. He currently works on the collaborative aspects of learner interaction in robot mediated activities.

Jonas is a co-founder of Furhat Robotics and Senior R&D Engineer. He is also a professor in speech communication with specialisation in multimodal embodied systems at KTH in Stockholm. His interests cover modelling, synthesis and understanding of human communicative signals and behaviours, from speech, facial expression and gaze to the dynamics of face-to-face interaction. In particular, he is passionate about making all of these ingredients available to machines so they can finally start acting a little more human.

Helen Hastie is a Professor of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, Director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Robotic and Autonomous Systems at the Edinburgh Centre of Robotics, and Academic Lead for the National Robotarium, opening in 2022 in Edinburgh. She is currently PI on the UKRI Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Node on Trust and HRI theme lead for the EPSRC ORCA Hub, and recently held a Royal Academy of Engineering/Leverhulme Senior Research Fellowship. Her field of research is multimodal and spoken dialogue systems, human-robot interaction and trustworthy autonomous systems. She was Co-ordinator of the EU project PARLANCE, has over 100 publications and has held positions on many scientific committees and advisory boards, including recently for the Scottish Government AI Strategy.