Below you will find the confirmed speakers for SoRAIM’27. Course titles and abstracts will be added once the programme is finalised.
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth André
University of Augsburg, Germany
Prof. Dr. Elisabeth André is Full Professor of Computer Science and Founding Chair of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at the University of Augsburg, a position she has held since 2001. Prior to joining Augsburg, she spent 13 years as a researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken, where she rose to Principal Researcher. She holds a diploma and a doctorate in Computer Science from Saarland University. Her research spans multimodal human-machine interaction, embodied conversational agents, affective computing, social signal processing, and social robotics. A flagship contribution is the open-source SSI (Social Signal Interpretation) framework for recording and analysing multimodal signals — including gaze, speech, and gesture — which is now used worldwide to endow robots and virtual agents with the ability to perceive and respond to human emotions.
Course: To be announced.
Dr. Sylvain Calinon
Idiap Research Institute & EPFL, Switzerland
Dr. Sylvain Calinon is a Senior Research Scientist at the Idiap Research Institute and a Lecturer at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He heads the Robot Learning & Interaction group at Idiap, with expertise in human-robot collaboration, robot learning from demonstration, geometric representations, and optimal control.
The approaches developed in his group can be applied to a wide range of applications requiring prehensile and non-prehensile manipulation skills, with robots that are either close to us (assistive and industrial robots), parts of us (prosthetics and exoskeletons), or far away from us (shared control and teleoperation).
Course: To be announced.
Dr. Oya Celiktutan
King’s College London, United Kingdom
Dr. Oya Celiktutan is a Reader in AI and Robotics in the Department of Engineering at King’s College London, where she leads the Social AI & Robotics Laboratory. She is also the Honorary Robotics Lead at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, working closely with two hospitals to translate socially assistive robotic technologies into clinical settings. Her research focuses on multimodal machine learning for autonomous robots and virtual agents that interact naturally with humans, including multimodal perception, human behaviour understanding and generation, and socially aware navigation and manipulation. Her work has been supported by EPSRC, The Royal Society, and the EU Horizon programme, as well as industrial partners such as Toyota Motor Europe and NVIDIA.
Course: To be announced.