Bodily Expressed Emotion
Understanding (BEEU)

Amy LaViers works at the intersection of robotics and dance, directing the Robotics, Automation, and Dance (RAD) Lab, a non-profit for artmaking, commercialization, education, outreach, and research, based in Philadelphia. Amy has extensive experience organizing numerous workshops, tutorials, exhibitions, and other events related to the proposed workshop topic. These include workshops at premier robotics venues such as IEEE ICRA, ACM/IEEE HRI, and RSS. In 2025, she also chaired the Arts in Robotics Track at ICRA. Her writing, choreography, and machine designs have been presented internationally in both engineering and arts venues, including Nature, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, The MIT Press, Merce Cunningham’s studios, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater, and the Performance Arcade.  Her teaching has been recognized on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s list of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students with Outstanding distinction, and she is a recipient of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award and Director’s Fellowship. Her work has been featured in media outlets like The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, and Dance Magazine.

Soujanya Poria is an Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. His research spans large language models, reasoning, AI safety, embodied and multimodal AI, and natural language processing. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Stirling (UK) and previously held roles at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and A*STAR’s Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC).

Beatrice de Gelder is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience at Maastricht University. Trained in philosophy and psychology, she earned her PhD (1972) from the University of Louvain and began her career teaching Philosophy of Science in Leiden and Tilburg before shifting to cognitive science in the mid-1990s. Her research focuses on non-conscious recognition after cortical damage, emotional expression in whole bodies, face recognition and its deficits, and multisensory perception across auditory–visual processing.

Heather Knight runs the CHARISMA Robotics research group at Oregon State University. Her previous work includes a postdoc at Stanford University, a PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University exploring Expressive Motion for Low Degree of Freedom Robots, and M.S. and B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additional past work include robotics and instrumentation at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, sensor design at Aldebaran Robotics, nine years of producing an annual Robot Film Festival, a robot flower garden installation at the Smithsonian/Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, robot comedy on TED.com, and a British Video Music Award for OK GO’s “This Too Shall Pass” music video featuring a two-floor Rube Goldberg Machine.

Lauren Bedal is a designer and thought leader in human-computer interaction, bridging the worlds of technology and embodiment. With an extensive background in movement, choreography and dance, she helps startups, agencies, and Fortune 100 companies like Google bring emerging technologies to market, specializing in embodied inputs such as proximity, gestures, body language, and biometrics (Project Soli).