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.
Dr. Alexandre Défossez
Kyutai, Gradium, France
Dr. Alexandre Défossez is a co-founder of Kyutai, a non profit lab for research in artificial intelligence based in Paris committed to open science. His work covers generative speech and multimodal AI (Moshi, Hibiki, DSM) with a strong focus on handling multiple streams jointly across modalities in a streaming and low latency fashion. He is also a co-founder and Chief Science Officer at Gradium, a startup launched in 2025 whose mission is to commercialize the best possible voice AI experience. Before that, Alexandre was a scientist for 3 years at Facebook AI Research in Paris, where he led the development of models for audio compression and modeling (AudioCraft, MusicGen, EnCodec). He graduated in mathematics from École Normale Supérieure, and did his PhD between INRIA and FAIR Paris on music source separation under the supervision of Francis Bach, Nicolas Usinier et Léon Bottou.
Course: To be announced.
Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency
Carnegie Mellon University, United States
Prof. Louis-Philippe Morency is an Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute, where he leads the MultiComp Lab. He was formerly research faculty at the University of Southern California and received his Ph.D. from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research builds the computational foundations that enable computers to analyze, recognize, and predict subtle human communicative behaviors during social interactions—work that has helped shape the broader field of multimodal machine learning, with applications across health, education, and social AI. He has received numerous honors, including being named one of AI’s 10 to Watch by IEEE Intelligent Systems, the NetExplo Award in partnership with UNESCO, and more than 10 best paper awards at IEEE and ACM conferences. His research has been covered by media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and NPR.
Course: To be announced.