Scientific Keynote Speakers
Dr. Tabitha C. Peck
Keynote: Understanding and Harnessing Self-Avatars to Investigate and Mitigate Bias
Tabitha C. Peck is currently an Associate Professor of mathematics and computer science at Davidson College, Davidson, NC, USA. Her research interests include developing and testing usable virtual reality systems, and the investigation of the psychological implications of embodiment in self-avatars with the goal of using avatars to reduce and mitigate bias. She has been both the Journal and Conference Paper Program Chair for IEEE VR, and the Journal Paper Science and Technology Chair for IEEE ISMAR. She is a Review Editor for Frontiers in Virtual Reality and an Associate Editor for Presence. She received the Ph.D. degree in computer science from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA, in 2010. She was the recipient of numerous honorable mentions and nominations for best paper awards at IEEE VR, and received the NSF CAREER Award in 2020. She is an IEEE Senior Member.
Dr. Ferran Argelaguet
Keynote: The Infinite Loop Understanding, Improving and Enriching VR Interaction
Ferran Argelaguet received the Habilitation degree in computer science from the University of Rennes 1, Rennes, France, in 2021, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from the Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain, in 2011. Since 2016, he has been a Research Scientist with the French Research Institute in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics (Inria), Rennes, France. His research interests include virtual and augmented reality, human perception and cognition, and human-computer interaction.
Dr. Zerrin Yumak
Keynote: Socially Interactive 3D Digital Humans: When AI meets XR for Non-verbal Communication
Dr. Zerrin Yumak is an assistant professor in the Information and Computing Sciences Department at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She is the director of the Motion Capture and Virtual Reality Lab (https://www.uu.nl/mocapvrlab). She has 15 years of experience in the area of believable virtual humans and social robots, in particular non-verbal behavior synthesis, multi-party interaction and emotion and memory modeling. She obtained her PhD from University of Geneva, Switzerland. She did her post-doc at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. She has been the Associate Editor of Visual Computer and Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds journals and she is the program committee member of several conferences such as ACM Siggraph/ Eurographics Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA), ACM Siggraph Motion In Games (MIG), Siggraph Asia, IEEE AIVR, IEEE VR, ACM Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) and International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS). She was the program chair of Computer Animation and Social Agents (CASA 2019) conference. She co-organized the MARCH@IEEEAIVR (Modeling and Animating Realistic Crowds and Humans), GENEA@ICMI (Generation and Evaluation of Non-verbal Behaviour for Embodied Agents) and MASSXR@IEEEVR (Multi-modal affective and Social Behavior Analysis and Synthesis in Extended Reality (MASSXR) workshops. Her papers received multiple awards. She is the co-organizer of the Embodied AI initiative at Utrecht University, coordinator and scientific director of the Embodied AI Lab for Social Good. Website: https://www.uu.nl/staff/ZYumak
