Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn (Ph.D., Stanford University) is a Professor of Advertising at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia. She is the founding director of the Center for Advanced Computer-Human Ecosystems (CACHE; www.ugavr.com) and the co-editor-in-chief of Media Psychology. Her main program of research investigates how immersive technologies such as virtual and augmented reality transform traditional rules of communication and social interactions, looking at how virtual experiences shape the way that people think, feel, and behave in the physical world. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, and published in numerous top-tier outlets in the fields of communication, health, and engineering.
Talk:
The Multiple Dimensions of Social in Social XR
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Marco Carli is Full Professor in the Department of Industrial, Electronic, and Mechanical Engineering at Roma Tre University, Roma, Italy. He received the Laurea degree in Telecommunications Engineering at the Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza', Roma, Italy and the Ph.D. degree from the Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland. He has been a Visiting Researcher with the Image Processing Laboratory, directed by prof. S.Mitra, UCSB, University of California, Santa Barbara, California, USA (2000-2004). His research interests are in the area of digital signal and image processing with applications to multimedia communications. Specifically, he has been working on digital watermarking, multimedia quality evaluation, information security. He is an Area Editor of Elsevier Signal Processing: Image Communication and Senior Associate Editor of IEEE Transaction of Image Processing. He is an IEEE Senior Member.
Talk:
Shaping VR Experiences: Designing Applications and Experiences for Quality of Experience Assessment
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Paulien Dresscher is an Amsterdam-based independent curator, researcher, and advisor specializing in culture and digital media. She collaborates with a wide variety of organizations such as PublicSpaces, the Nederlands Film Festival, CIIIC, the Rathenau Institute, Waag Futurelab, the Institute for Sound and Vision, and Into the Great Wide Open. Paulien holds a Bachelor's degree in Media and Fine Arts from the Minerva Academy in Groningen, as well as a Master's in New Media and a Research Master's in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam.
Talk:
From Principle to Practice: Public Values in Action
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Elmar Eisemann is a professor at Delft University of Technology, heading the Computer Graphics and Visualization Group. His interests include real-time and perceptual rendering methods, visualization, data-driven graphics, and GPU acceleration techniques. He was honored with the Eurographics Young Researcher Award 2011, the Netherlands Prize for ICT Research 2019, and is a fellow of the Eurographics Association.
Talk:
Making a Virtual Reality
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Jan van Erp is principal scientist with The Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and full professor with Computer Science at the University of Twente. Jan’s research focusses on multisensory perception and cognition, applied neuroscience, telepresence, robotics, human-machine collaboration in complex environments, and mediated social interaction. He published 100+ peer reviewed papers and held many board and advisory functions, amongst others for ISO, NATO, the Eurohaptics and Worldhaptics Societies, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. Jan is the current chair of the TNO Institutional Review Board for human subjects experiments, chair of the NATO Research Groups on Cognitive Neuro-enhancement and on Neurostimulation, general chair of IEEE Telepresence 2025, and co-chair of the IEEE Future Direction Telepresence initiative.
Talk:
Robotic Avatar Mediated Social Interaction
LinkedIn
Dr. Guo Freeman is a Dean's Associate Professor in Human-Centered Computing at Clemson University. At Clemson, she directs the Gaming and Mediated Experience Lab (CUGAME). Her work focuses on how interactive technologies such as online games, esports, live streaming, social VR, and generative AI shape interpersonal relationships and group behavior; and how to design safe, inclusive, and supportive social VR spaces to combat emergent harassment risks especially for marginalized users. She has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and won 14 Best Paper or Honorable Mentions Awards (top 3%-5%) at ACM SIGCHI venues. She has secured $30 million in external grant funding from the US National Science Foundation, US Army, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. She has served as ACM CHI 2025 Games and Play Subcommittee Chair, ACM CHI PLAY 2024 General Chair, ACM GROUP 2025 General Chair, ACM CHI PLAY Steering Committee member, among other leadership roles.
Talk:
Novel Opportunities and Emerging Risks of Social Virtual Reality Spaces for Online Interactions
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Jesús Gutiérrez is assistant professor at the Image Processing Group (GTI) of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Spain. His research interests are in the area of image and video processing, evaluation of user quality of experience, immersive media technologies, and visual attention and human perception. Currently, he is the chair of Immersive Media Group (IMG) of the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG).
Talk:
Cooperative Development of Social XR Evaluation Methods
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Mariëtte van Huijstee, PhD, is Coordinator at the Rathenau Instituut. She leads Rathenau’s activities around XR, such as the Rathenau Scan on Immersive Technologies. She heads a team of researchers that focuses on the impact of technology on our society and the social responsibility of technology companies. Her team's work includes research into the societal consequences of the dominant position of multinational platform companies, the societal impact of new technologies such as immersive technology, and designing the digital society of the future. In doing so, she is always looking for ways to translate scientific insights to a wider audience and make them applicable for policymakers and practitioners, for example by making a podcast about immersive technology, or by developing a workshop format to engage with citizens on the digital environment of the future.
Talk:
From Principle to Practice: Public Values in Action
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Alina specializes in spatial Computing and XR research, leveraging on creating a human-centered interoperable future of Computing while contributing to various initiatives, publications and standards. She is a Co-founding member of XRSI Europe. Alina set up and has been leading the EU activities of Open AR Cloud Europe gUG as managing director through EU-funded research projects like NGI Atlantic, NGI Search and the Horizon Europe-funded project XR4Human.
Talk:
Interoperability: What is a Visual Positioning System and Why an Open Source One and Interoperability Between These Systems Need to be Established
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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.
Talk:
Privacy, Security and UX Challenges in (Social) XR: an Overview
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Pablo Pérez is lead scientist at Nokia Extended Reality Lab in Madrid, Spain. He is currently leading the scientific activities of Nokia XR Lab, addressing the end-to-end technological chain of the use of Extended Reality for human communication: networking, system architecture, processing algorithms, quality of experience and human-computer interaction. He is also Nokia delegate in ITU-T SG12 and member of the board of VQEG.
Talk:
Cooperative Development of Social XR Evaluation Methods
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Aljosa Smolic is Professor in the Computer Science Department of Hochschule Luzern in Switzerland and Co-Head of the Immersive Realities Research Lab. Before that, he was SFI Research Professor of Creative Technologies at Trinity College Dublin (TCD, 2016-2021), where he was heading the research group V-SENSE. His research interests include immersive technologies such as AR, VR, volumetric video, 360/omni-directional video, light-fields, and VFX/animation, with a special focus on deep learning in visual computing.
Talk:
AI-based Volumetric Content Creation for Immersive XR Experiences and Production Workflows
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Dr. Funda Yildirim is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Twente, Netherlands. As a computer scientist with a PhD in cognitive neuroscience, her research focuses on using extended reality (XR), sensory feedback, and neural signals to influence sustainable, health-related, and pro-social behaviors. Her work explores topics such as consumption preferences, attitudes toward climate change, and smart city usability, bridging technology and behavioral science.
Talk:
Changing Habits, One Experience at a Time
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Emin Zerman is an Associate Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Mid Sweden University, working as part of the Realistic3D research group. Previously, he has been working as a postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, working on the V-SENSE project on immersive imaging technologies. He is interested in multimedia quality assessment, human visual perception, user interaction, immersive multimedia, data visualization, and 3D technologies. He organized several special sessions and tutorials on immersive imaging technologies at various conferences.
Talk:
Challenge-Driven Quality Evaluation and Dataset Development for Immersive Visual Experiences
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