Humantech Meetings: Are robots human too? About human-intelligent machine interaction

Agnieszka Wykowska – leads the unit “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction” at the Italian Institute of Technology (Genoa, Italy), and is an adjunct professor of engineering psychology at the Luleå University of Technology as well as visiting professor at the University of Manchester. She graduated in neuro-cognitive psychology (2006, LMU Munich), obtained PhD in psychology (2008) and the German “Habilitation” (2013) from LMU Munich. In 2016 she was awarded the ERC Starting grant “InStance”. She is an Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Social Robotics and an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Psychology. She is a board member of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN). In her research, she combines cognitive neuroscience methods with human-robot interaction in order to understand the human brain mechanisms in interaction with natural and artificial agents.

Christoph Bartneck – is associate professor and director of postgraduate studies at the HIT Lab NZ of the University of Canterbury. He has a background in Industrial Design and Human-Computer Interaction, and his projects and studies have been published in leading journals, newspapers, and conferences. His interests lie in the fields of HCI, Science and Technology Studies, and Visual Design. More specifically, he focuses on the effect of anthropomorphism on human-robot interaction. As a secondary research interest he works on bibliometric analyses, agent based social simulations, and the critical review on scientific processes and policies. In the field of Design Christoph investigates the history of product design, tessellations and photography.

He has worked for several international organizations including the Technology Centre of Hannover (Germany), LEGO (Denmark), Eagle River Interactive (USA), Philips Research (Netherlands), ATR (Japan), and The Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands). Christoph is an associate editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics, the International Journal of Human Computer Studies and Entertainment Computing Journal. Christoph is a member of the New Zealand Institute for Language Brain & Behavior, ACM SIGCHI, The New Zealand Association Of Scientists and Academic Freedom Aotearoa. The press regularly reports on his work, including the New Scientist, Scientific American, Popular Science, Wired, New York Times, The Times, BBC, Huffington Post, Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Economist.

Mateusz Łukasiak – is a graduate of the Medical University of Warsaw (WUM) and President of the Polish Transhumanist Association. He is interested in applications of new technologies in medicine and human-machine interactions. Mateusz is an enthusiast transhumanism, in particular longevity and morphological freedom, realized also through cyborgization, i.e. an integration of mechanical elements with a human body. He is an organizer of an annual scientific conferences on “Transhumanism: Ideas, strategies, doubts”, and a series of lectures on the subject of “Transhumanism in Warsaw”.

Kamil Muzyka – is a doctoral candidate at the Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He specializes in the space production law and artificial intelligence law. He published numerous articles on the legal aspects of AI in Paladyn, a journal of behavioral robotics, the Journal of Artificial General Intelligence, and Maska, a Polish online magazine devoted to anthropology, sociology, and culture. He is a member of the Polish Transhumanist Association, member of the board of the Polska Fundacja Fantastyki Naukowej (Polish Sci-Fi Foundation), and a member of The Spokesmen of Science association. He completed a fellowship at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, at Trinity College in Hartford, USA (2013-2014). His lectures and talks often focus on robotization of industry, self-replicating technologies, and legal aspects of synthetic biology and industrial astrobiology.

Paweł Zarzycki – is the founder of SmartLife Robotics. He graduated from the Warsaw University of Technology with a Master’s degree in computer engineering. He also obtained an MBA, with honors, from Oxford Brookes University. Paweł is an expert in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). He was named one of the "50 most creative business people in Poland" in 2015, and was the finalist in the SingularityU Global Impact Challenge 2018. He published articles on semantic technologies and controlled natural languages. He is currently a doctoral student at the Interdisciplinary Doctoral School at SWPS University and PJATK.. He thesis focuses on social robots (affective robotics). Recently, he has become a member of the Human-Tech Center for Social and Technological Innovation at SWPS University.

Konrad Maj, Ph.D. – Social psychologist, Head of the HumanTech Meetings project, initiator and Head of the HumanTech Center for Social and Technological Innovations. In his research and teaching he focuses on social influence, media psychology and innovations. Recently, he has been working on a Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) project. From 2013 to 2016 he held the post of Rector’s Representative for Research, focusing on practical application of research results and social innovations. He visited numerous innovation centers, including the Institute for Social Innovation (ISI) at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA, the ID+ Research Institute for Design, Media and Culture at the University of Averio, Portugal, and Design Factory at Aalto University, in Finland.