Prof. Yiannis Demiris

Imperial College London

Yiannis Demiris is a Professor in Human-Centred Robotics at Imperial College, where he holds a Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging Technologies (Personal Assistive Robotics). He established the Personal Robotics Laboratory at Imperial in 2001. He holds a PhD in Intelligent Robotics, and a BSc(Hons) in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, both from the University of Edinburgh. He has been a European Science Foundation (ESF) junior scientist Fellow, and a COE Fellow at the Agency of Industrial Science and Technology (AIST - ETL) of Japan. Since 2014, he is a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (FIET), and a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS). Prof. Demiris' research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Intelligent Robotics, as they pertain to interactive, or 'human-in-the-loop' systems.

Prof. Hatice Gunes

University of Cambridge

Prof. Hatice Gunes is the Affective Intelligence and Robotics Lab (AFAR Lab) at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology. Prof. Gunes spearheads research on multimodal, social, and affective intelligence for AI systems, particularly embodied agents and robots, by cross-fertilizing research in the fields of Machine Learning, Affective Computing, Social Signal Processing, and Human Nonverbal Behaviour Understanding. She is an internationally recognized scholar in affective computing and affective robotics and a former President of the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing (AAAC) and was a Faculty Fellow (2019-2021) of the Alan Turing Institute – UK’s national centre for data science and artificial intelligence. She was named in the shortlist for the Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature 2025 which celebrates inspirational women in technology who are poised to redefine the future of their fields.

Dr. Tom Erez

Google DeepMind

Tom Erez is a research scientist with DeepMind in London, where he studies Embodied Intelligence in real and simulated robots. Tom’s team develops several open-source projects, including MuJoCo and MuJoCo-MPC. Tom has a B.Sc. in Math from Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Washington University in St. Louis. He joined DeepMind in 2014 after a post-doc with Emo Todorov in UW Seattle.

Prof. Thrishantha Nanayakkara

Imperial College London

Prof. Thrishantha Nanayakkara is the director of Morph Lab at Imperial College London. He received his PhD and Masters degrees from Saga University in 2001 and 1998 respectively. He obtained his bachelors from the University of Moratuwa in 1996 where he served as a faculty member in the following years. His research in controllable stiffness robots tries to understand how physical mechanisms in the body and environment contribute to solve computational problems to achieve accurate perception and stable action in dynamic environments.

Prof. Kaspar Althoefer

Queen Mary University London

Prof. Kaspar Althoefer is a systems engineer, leading research on Robotics at Queen Mary University of London. After graduating with a degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Technology Aachen, Germany, and obtaining a PhD in Robot Motion Planning from Kings College London, he joined the Kings Robotics Group in 1996 as a Lecturer. Made a Senior Lecturer in 2006, he was promoted to Reader and Professor in 2009 and 2011, respectively. In April 2016, he joined Queen Mary as full Professor of Robotics Engineering. His current research interests are in the areas of robot autonomy, soft robotics, modelling of tool-environment interaction dynamics, tactile sensing and neuro-fuzzy-based sensor signal classification with applications in robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery, rehabilitation, assistive technologies and human-robot interactions in the manufacturing environment.