Kerstin Dautenhahn is full Professor in the School of Computer Science at University of
Hertfordshire in U.K. where she coordinates the Adaptive Systems Research Group. She has
lead research in social robotics, human-robot interaction, assistive technology and published
more than 300 research articles. Prof. Dautenhahn has edited several books and frequently
gives invited keynote lectures at international meetings. She organizes international
conferences and has been Principal Investigator of her research team in many European FP5/6/7
projects. Prof. Dautenhahn is Editor in Chief of the Journal of Interaction Studies: Social
Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems, as well as Associate Editor
of several other international journals.
Jan de Ruiter obtained a degree in Cognitive Science at the Radboud University in Nijmegen,
the Netherlands. He wrote his PhD thesis on gesture and speech production with Willem Levelt
at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. During the early noughties, he
worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cologne, Germany, at the Department
of Social Psychology. From 2002 to 2008 he returned to the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen
and coordinated the Multimodal Interaction project in the Language and Cognition group. In
2009 he accepted a Chair for Psycholinguistics at Bielefeld University, Germany. Currently
he is the coordinator of the DFG funded Sonderforschungsbereich "Alignment in Communication".
Jan de Ruiter's research focuses on the interface between cognition, communication, and language.
Research topics include speech related gesture, gesture in aphasia, turn-taking, and intention
recognition in communication. Jan de Ruiter was a P.I. in several EU-funded Artificial Agent
and Robotics projects. Currently, he is working on developing a socially well-behaved robot
bartender in the EU project JAMES.
Adam Kendon
Adam Kendon studied biological sciences at Cambridge University (BA 1955) and took a D.Phil.
at Oxford (1963). He has taught and done research at various institutions, including University
of Pittsburgh, Cornell University, Bronx State Hospital (New York), Australian National University,
University of Naples (Orientale), University of Calabria, and the University of Pennsylvania.
He is the author of a collection of papers on social interaction, Conducting Interaction
(Cambridge University Press 1990), a major work on Australian Aboriginal sign languages (Cambridge
University Press 1988), and a general discussion of gesture published as Gesture: Visible Action
as Utterance (Cambridge University Press 2004). He published an English translation of Andrea
de Jorio's 1832 treatise on Neapolitan gesture in 2000. He is the author of numerous articles on
social interaction, gesture and sign language, and the problem of language origins. He is currently
a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Sciences, University of Pennsylvania,
is editor of the journal Gesture (published by John Benjamins) and an Honorary President of the
International Society of Gesture Studies.
Louis-Philippe Morency is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science
at the University of Southern California (USC) and Research Scientist at the USC Institute
for Creative Technologies where he leads the Multimodal Communication and Machine Learning
Laboratory (MultiComp Lab). He received his Ph.D. and Master degrees from MIT Computer Science
and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research interests are in computational study of
nonverbal social communication, a multi-disciplinary research topic that overlays the fields of
multimodal interaction, computer vision, machine learning, social psychology and artificial
intelligence. Dr. Morency was selected in 2008 by IEEE Intelligent Systems as one of the Ten
to Watch for the future of AI research. He received 6 best paper awards in multiple ACM- and
IEEE-sponsored conferences for his work on context-based gesture recognition, multimodal
probabilistic fusion and computational modeling of human communication dynamics. His work was
reported in The Economist, New Scientist and Fast Company magazines.
Nicu Sebe is with the University of Trento, Italy, where he is leading the research in
the areas of multimedia information retrieval and human-computer interaction in computer
vision applications. He was involved in the organization of the major conferences and
workshops addressing the computer vision and human-centered aspects of multimedia information
retrieval, among which as a General Co-Chair of the IEEE Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition
Conference, FG 2008, ACM International Conference on Image and Video Retrieval (CIVR) 2007
and 2010. He is the general chair of ACM Multimedia 2013 and of ECCV 2016 and was a program
chair of ACM Multimedia 2011 and 2007. He has been a visiting professor in Beckman Institute,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in the Electrical Engineering Department,
Darmstadt University of Technology, Germany. He is a co-chair of the IEEE Computer Society
Task Force on Human-centered Computing and is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions
on Multimedia, Computer Vision and Image Uniderstanding, Machine Vision and Applications,
Image and Vision Computing, and of Journal of Multimedia.
Bjoern W. Schuller received his diploma in 1999, his doctoral degree for his study on
Automatic Speech and Emotion Recognition in 2006, and his habilitation and private
lectureship (German PD) in the subject area of Signal Processing and Machine Intelligence
for his work on Intelligent Audio Analysis in 2012 all in electrical engineering and
information technology from TUM (Munich University of Technology) in Munich/Germany.
At present, he is tenured as Senior Lecturer heading the Machine Intelligence and Signal
Processing (MISP) Group at TUM's Institute for Human-Machine Communication since 2006.
From 2009 to 2010 he lived in Paris/France and was with the CNRS-LIMSI Spoken Language
Processing Group in Orsay/France dealing with affective and social signals in speech.
In 2010 he was also a visiting scientist in the Imperial College London's Department of
Computing in London/UK working on audiovisual behaviour recognition. In 2011 he was guest
lecturer at the Universita' Politecnica delle Marche (UNIVPM) in Ancona/Italy and visiting
researcher of NICTA in Sydney/Australia. In 2012 he was with JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Institute
for Information and Communication Technologies in Graz/Austria, working in the Research
Group for Remote Sensing and Geoinformation and the Research Group for Space and Acoustics.
Best known are his works advancing Machine Intelligence, Audiovisual Signal Processing,
Human-Computer-Interaction, and Affective Computing. Dr. Schuller is president-elect of
the HUMAINE Association, elected member of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical
Committee, and member of the ACM, IEEE and ISCA and (co-)authored 4 books and more than
300 publications in peer reviewed books (23), journals (45), and conference proceedings
in the field leading to more than 3,400 citations (h-index = 30). He serves as co-founding
member and secretary of the steering committee, associate editor, and guest editor of the
IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, associate and repeated guest editor for the
Computer Speech and Language, associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man
and Cybernetics: Part B Cybernetics and the IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and
Learning Systems, and guest editor for the IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine, Speech
Communication, Image and Vision Computing, Cognitive Computation, and the EURASIP Journal
on Advances in Signal Processing, reviewer for more than 50 leading journals and 40 conferences
in the field, and as workshop and challenge organizer including the first of their kind
INTERSPEECH 2009 Emotion, 2010 Paralinguistic, 2011 Speaker State, and 2012 Speaker Trait
Challenges and the 2011 and 2012 Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge and Workshop and programme
committee member of more than 50 international workshops and conferences. Steering and
involvement in current and past research projects includes the European Community funded
ASC-Inclusion STREP project as coordinator and the awarded SEMAINE project, and projects
funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and companies such as BMW, Continental,
Daimler, HUAWEI, Siemens, Toyota, and VDO. Advisory board activities comprise his membership
as invited expert in the W3C Emotion Incubator and Emotion Markup Language Incubator Groups.
Obtained his degree in Psychology in Liege, Belgium, in 1986, and in Computer Science in
Louvain, Belgium, in 1988 followed by a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at Brown University
(USA) in 1992. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Action Editor for
Psychological Science and Editor of Frontiers in Perception Science. He researches the
information processing mechanisms of face, object and scene categorization in the brain.
Alessandro Vinciarelli (
http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~vincia)
is a Lecturer at the University of Glasgow (UK)
and a Senior Researcher at the Idiap Research Institute (Switzerland). His main research interest
is in Social Signal Processing, the domain aimed at modelling analysis and synthesis of nonverbal
behaviour in social interactions. In particular, Alessandro has investigated approaches for role
recognition in multiparty conversations, automatic personality perception from speech, and conflict
analysis and measurement in competitive discussions. Overall, Alessandro has published more than 80
works, including one authored book, three edited volumes, and 22 journal papers. Alessandro has
participated in the organization of the IEEE International Conference on Social Computing as a
Program Chair in 2011 and as a General Chair in 2012, he has initiated and chaired a large number
of international workshops, including the Social Signal Processing Workshop, the International
Workshop on Socially Intelligence Surveillance and Monitoring, the International Workshop on
Human Behaviour Understanding, the Workshop on Political Speech and the Workshop on Foundations
of Social Signals. Furthermore, Alessandro is or has been Principal Investigator of several national
and international projects, including a European Network of Excellence (the SSPNet, www.sspnet.eu),
an Indo-Swiss Joint Research Project (
http://www.idiap.ch/project/ccpp/)
and an individual project in
the framework of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research IM2 (
http://www.im2.ch). Last,
but not least, Alessandro is co-founder of Klewel (
http://www.klewel.com), a knowledge management
company recognized with several awards.
