Speakers

Gül Akcaova is the lead futurist at SURF - the cooperative for ICT in (higher) education and research in the Netherlands, and the National Education & Research Network. With a keen fascination for IT innovation in education and research, she explores in her role the potential impact of new technologies and emerging concepts on education and research. Her background in management studies provides her with the ability to approach developments from various angles. Some of her work includes the SURF Tech Trends 2023 and 2026, white papers on BCI, Metaverse concept and Quantum communication.

Katrien De Moor is associate professor at the department of Information Security and Communication Technology at NTNU, mainly focusing on socio-technical approaches in ICT research. Katrien received her PhD degree in Social Sciences from Ghent University (2012) with a thesis on bridging gaps in Quality of Experience research and its challenges. She is passionate about user research and user involvement in user-centric innovation processes.

Dr. Yan Feng is Assistant Professor and Director of Mobility in eXtended Reality Lab at Delft University of Technology. Her research focuses on using eXtended Reality (XR), including Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality, to study human mobility behavior in urban environments across diverse modes such as walking, cycling, automated vehicles, and public transportation. She leads interdisciplinary research at the intersection of transportation engineering, design, architecture, and human-computer interaction to better understand how people move, interact, and make decisions in both high-risk and future-oriented mobility scenarios. She is particularly committed to advancing human-centered and inclusive mobility systems and developing XR-based methods for studying wayfinding, evacuation, human-vehicle interaction, safety training and transportation accessibility.

Dr. Alexandra Kitson (she/her) is an interdisciplinary researcher at the School of Interactive Arts & Technology, Simon Fraser University. Her work focuses on designing, developing, and evaluating emerging technologies—including XR, AI, and wearable systems—to promote health and well-being. Her award-winning research has been showcased internationally and published in top venues such as ACM CHI, IEEE VR, and NeurIPS. Driven by a passion for social impact, Dr. Kitson applies her expertise to real-world applications through community-engaged research.

Alexandre Mercat is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Tampere University (TAU), Finland. He received his Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from INSA Rennes, France, in 2018, and was a Postdoctoral Researcher at TAU from 2018 to 2024. Within the Ultra Video Group (UVG), his research spans video coding, processing, streaming, energy- and complexity-aware design, and emerging volumetric formats, with a strong emphasis on open-source encoders and datasets. He has co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications, developed widely used open-source codecs and datasets, and received multiple Best Paper Awards, including at ACM MMSys and IEEE VCIP. He is a member of the IEEE Visual Signal Processing and Communications Technical Committee and co-founded the Insights from Negative Results track in the Journal of Signal Processing Systems.

In addition to his role as coordinator of the HORIZON Europe TRANSMIXR project, Niall Murray (Member, IEEE) is a Senior Lecturer with the Faculty of Engineering and Informatics, Technological University of the Shannon (Athlone Campus), Ireland. He is also the Founder, in 2014, and the Principal Investigator (PI) in the truly Immersive and Interactive Multimedia Experiences (tIIMEx) Research Group in TUS. He is a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Funded Investigator (FI) with the SFI Adapt Centre for AI enabled Digital Content and an FI with the Confirm Centre for Smart manufacturing. His current research interests include immersive and multisensory multimedia communication and applications, multimedia signal processing, QoE, and wearable sensor systems.

Marta Orduna is a Telecommunication Engineer, BSc and MSc degrees in Telecommunication Engineering both from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM). In 2023, she received her PhD from UPM entitled "Understanding and Assessing Quality of Experience in Immersive Communications". In 2023, she joined Nokia XR Lab in Spain, where she continues her research line of the PhD in the area of quality of experience in extended reality. She serves as the Nokia delegate at ITU-T SG-12 and is a co-chair of VQEG-IMG. She has served as chair of a workshop at ACM CHI'22, ACM CSCW'23, and TAS’24, industry chair of ACM IMX'24, demo chair of ACM IMX'25, diversity and inclusion chair of QoMEX'25, and workshop chair of MMVE’25 and IXR'25. She has been one of the organizers of the EURASIP International Summer School on eXtended Reality Technology and eXperience 2025. She is a member of the Governing Board of the Spanish Official College of Telecommunications Engineers (COIT-AEIT).

Chirag Raman an Assistant Professor leading the Tapri Lab at TU Delft. His research interests lie in understanding and synthesizing intelligence - human-like and other forms — through the development of multimodal generative AI techniques.

Dr. Wohn (she/her) is an associate professor at NJIT and director of the Social Interaction Lab. She studies the characteristics and consequences of social interactions in online environments such as virtual worlds/metaverse and social media.

Zerrin Yumak is an associate professor in the Human-Centered Computing Group at the Information and Computing Sciences Department of Utrecht University. She is the scientific director of the Motion Capture and Virtual Reality Lab. She has 15 years of experience in the area of believable virtual humans and social robots, in particular on non-verbal behavior synthesis, multi-party interaction and emotion and memory modeling.