Dr. Anna Ciaunica is a Principal Investigator at the Centre for Philosophy of Science, University of Lisbon, Portugal; and Research Associate at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, the UK. Dr. Ciaunica is currently Principal Investigator on three interdisciplinary projects looking at the relationship between self-awareness, embodiment and social interactions in humans and artificial agents. Her approach is highly interdisciplinary, using methods from philosophy, experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, phenomenology and arts. She is also coordinator of the Network for Embodied Consciousness, Technology and the Arts (NECTArs) – a collaborative platform bringing together artists, researchers, stakeholders, policy makers and people with lived experiences, aiming at fostering creative solutions to timely questions such as self-consciousness and (dis)embodiment in our hyper-digitalized and hyper-connected world.

Professor Agnieszka Wykowska leads the unit “Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction” at the Italian Institute of Technology (Genoa, Italy), where she is also the Coordinator of the Center for Human Technologies (CHT). She combines cognitive neuroscience methods with human-robot interaction in order to understand the human brain mechanisms in interaction with natural and artificial agents. In 2016, she was awarded the ERC Starting grant “InStance": "Intentional Stance for Social Attunement”. She fulfills several academic services, including serving as the Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Social Robotics (IJSR), Associate Editor of Frontiers in Psychology, President of European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (ESCAN), and a core member of Association of ERC Grantees.