Towards a Symbiotic Society  with Humans and AI

Adriana TAPUS is Full Professor in the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Lab in the Computer Science and System Engineering Department (U2IS), at ENSTA, part of IP Paris (QS=46), France. In 2011, she obtained the French Habilitation (HDR) for her thesis entitled “Towards Personalized Human-Robot Interaction”. She received her PhD in Computer Science from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland in 2005 and her degree of Engineer in Computer Science and Engineering from Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania in 2001. She worked as an Associate Researcher at the University of Southern California (USC), where she was among the pioneers on the development of socially assistive robotics, also participating to activity in machine learning, human sensing, and human-robot interaction. Her main interests are on long-term learning (i.e. in particular in interaction with humans), human modeling, and on-line robot behavior adaptation to external environmental factors. Prof. Tapus is an Associate Editor for International Journal of Social Robotics (IJSR), Senior Editor for Intenational Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) and Chief-in-Editor for Frontiers in Robotics HRI topic, and in the steering committee of several major robotics conferences (General Chair 2019 of HRI, Program Chair 2018 of HRI, General Chair 2017 of ECMR, Program Chair ICSR 2025, International Advisory Board ICSR 2026). She received the Romanian Academy Award for her contributions in assistive robotics in 2010.  She was elected in 2016 as one of the 25 women in robotics you need to know about. She is also the PI of various EU and French National research grants. She received several awards for her research (e.g., Finalist of Best Paper Award IROS 2025). She has more than 250 research publications and she is listed for the fifth consecutive year among the World's Top 2% Scientists. In 2025, she was elected Honorary Member of the Academy of Technical Sciences in Romania.

Todd Lubart obtained his PHD from Yale University. He is a full professor of psychology at University Paris Cité. Co-director of an applied psychology research laboratory, coordinator of several grants and contracts, he has approximately 300 scientific publications in articles, books and psychological tests. His lines of research involve the identification and development of creative potential, creativity assessments, creative giftedness, environmental support for creativity and the impact of generative AI on creativity. Todd Lubart was a member of the Institut Universitaire de France and is president of ISSCI (the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation, issci.online).

Hiroshi Ishiguro received a Ph. D. from Osaka University, Japan in 1991. He is currently Professor of Department of Systems Innovation at Osaka University, Visiting Director of Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR), Project Manager of MOONSHOT R&D Project, Thematic Project Producer of EXPO 2025 Osaka, Kansai, Japan, and CEO of AVITA, Inc. His research interests are interactive robotics, avatar, and android science. Geminoid is an avatar android that is a copy of himself. In 2011, he won the Osaka Cultural Award. In 2015, he received the Prize for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. He was also awarded the Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Award in Dubai in 2015. Tateisi Award in 2020, and honorary doctorate of Aarhus university in 2021.

Joffrey Becker was trained in social anthropology at EHESS. He holds a teaching chair at ENSEA, and his research is affiliated with the ETIS laboratory (UMR CNRS 8051). His work focuses on robotics and artificial intelligence, aiming to understand how intelligent systems reconfigure representations, relationships, and practices. 

Donatien Aubert is an artist, researcher and author. His theoretical and visual work aims to problematize contemporary anthropological mutations. He is particularly interested in the philosophical, scientific and political legacy of cybernetic paradigms, and their resilience in movements such as ecology. After graduating with honors from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Arts de Paris-Cergy, he carried out post-master's research at the Laboratoire de l'École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (EnsadLab). He was part of the Spatial Media program, specialized in the creation of virtual reality experiences and shared 3D environments. He also holds a doctorate in comparative literature from Sorbonne University's Faculty of Arts and Humanities. His thesis presents how the arts of memory (ancient heuristics based on the spatialization of knowledge) have been updated in the field of human-machine interactions. Donatien Aubert creates hybrid works (videos, interactive installations, virtual reality programs, sculptures created by computer-assisted design and manufacturing, art & science projects), balancing, in the service of an epistemological and historical perspective, forms that owe as much to the classical culture of curiosity (scientific and literate) as to that of contemporary technoscience. He has been exhibited in several biennials in France and internationally (Némo, Chroniques, Elektra). He won the CNAP photographic commission "Image 3.0" in 2020 and the Curator’s prize of the OPLINE Prize in 2024. His work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Odile Ouizeman Gallery, Paris, in 2021 and at Le Hublot, Nice, in 2024. He is published in Paris by Hermann Éditions (Vers une disparition programmatique d'Homo sapiens ?, 2017) and has also participated in scientific works, notably L'art de la mémoire et les images mentales, published by the Collège de France in 2018.

Salvatore Maria Anzalone is Maître de Conférences at Université Paris 8, member of the Artificial and Human Cognitions Laboratory (2016), leading the Cognition and Social Interactions group (2020) and Director of the LUTIN research platform (2024). He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Palermo (2010). He collaborates since then with several institutions in Italy (University of Padua), Japan (Osaka University) and France (Sorbonne Université and Pitié-Salpêtrière Medical Hospital). His research interests focus on Social Robotics, spanning from the analysis of interpersonal dynamics to the development of socio-cognitive behaviors, with the goal of allowing robots to express high degrees of social intelligence. He extensively worked on such topics in the specific context of socially assistive robotics for children with neurodevelopmental disorders. He was awarded as JSPS Research Fellow from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2011-2012) and recipient of a grant from the Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (2013). He participated in several national and European projects such as the FP7 Michelangelo. He coordinated the French-Swiss bilateral project ANR-FNS iReCheck (2019-2023), the French national project “Scène and Robotique” (2020-2023), he is part of the PEPR O2R (2023-2030) and, since 2017, he is part of the steering committee of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics group of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence. Since 2021, he joined the editorial board of the Springer’s International Journal of Social Robotics as managing editor.

Erica Magris is Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Paris 8 and Associate Researcher at THALIM (CNRS). Her research focuses on contemporary European theatre (20th–21st centuries), with particular attention to the relationships between theatrical practices, media environments, and technologies. She co-edited Les Théâtres documentaires (Deuxième époque, 2019) with Béatrice Picon-Vallin, and was co–principal investigator of the collaborative projects Scènes augmentée (2015–2018) and Scène et robotique (2021–2023). She also co-directs the postdoctoral programme SCÈNE·R (Contemporary Scenes in the Digital Age).

Lionel Obadia, PhD in Sociology, is a Professor of Anthropology  at the University of Lyon and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Brussels (2021) and Oxford (2022). He owns the chair “magic of technologies” at the Institut Universitaire de France (2025-2030). He first specialized in anthropology of religion, Asian religions and globalization. His main research interests included hybridization and cultural/religious transfers. He has conducted fieldwork in France, Europe and Israel (on Western Buddhism), Nepal (on Shamanism), United States (on Jewish messianism), and South India (in Auroville). Currently, he conducts research on magical thinking and beliefs in digital technologies, AI and robots in Europe and worldwide, as a member of executive committee of large programs on digital collaboration (PEPR Ensemble) and social robotics (PEPR O2R). He is the author of more than 10 books, edited 20 special issues of journals and published 180 journal articles and chapters in French, English, Spanish, and Chinese. Recently published : “Deadbots, griefbots and postmortem technologies - a computational challenge against death?” Jordi Vallverdu et al. (Eds) Seconddeath, Experiences of Death Across Technologies, Springer (2025).