EMERGE’s Advisory Board provides external feedback and advice on several critical project dimensions.
Alan Winfield
University of the West of England
Alan Winfield is Professor of Robot Ethics at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK, Visiting Professor at the University of York, and Associate Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Intelligence He received his PhD in Digital Communications from the University of Hull in 1984, then co-founded and led APD Communications Ltd until taking-up appointment at UWE, Bristol in 1992. Alan co-founded the Bristol Robotics Laboratory where his current research is focused on the science, engineering, and ethics of intelligent robots.
Alan is an advocate for robot ethics; he is a member of the British Standards Institute working group on robot ethics, currently working on a new standard on Sustainable Robotics. He sits on the executive of the IEEE Standards Association Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, and chaired Working Group P7001, which drafted IEEE standard 7001-2021 on Transparency of Autonomous Systems. Alan has published over 270 works, including Robotics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012), and blogs at alanwinfield.blogspot.com.
Alan is passionate about communicating research and ideas in science, engineering, and technology; he led UK-wide public engagement project Walking with Robots, awarded the 2010 Royal Academy of Engineering Rooke medal for public promotion of engineering. Until recently he was director of UWE’s Science Communication Unit. Alan is frequently called upon by the press and media to comment on developments in AI and robotics; he was a guest on the BBC Radio 4 series The Life Scientific and interviewed for BBC News HARDtalk .
Andra Keay
Association for Manufacturing Technologies | Silicon Valley Robotics
Andra Keay is a global thought leader and ecosystem builder in the emerging sectors of robotics. She is the VP of Global Robotics at AMT, the Association for Manufacturing Technologies and the Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics, an industry group supporting innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies. The Silicon Valley area is home to the world’s largest robotics and AI cluster, with over 600 robotics companies, and more than 50 robotics/AI research labs.
Andra is an experienced robotics, AI and deep-tech investor and startup advisor, the founder of Robot Launch, global startup competition, cofounder of Women in Robotics and Robot Garden makerspace. Andra is also the VP of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Industrial Activities Board and the Deep Tech VP for IEEE Entrepreneurship. She is involved in global standards development for inclusive and ethical A/IS, autonomous and intelligent systems.
Lucia Melloni
Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics
Lucia Melloni is broadly interested in understanding the neural underpinnings of how we see (perception), how and why we experience what we see (consciousness) and how those experiences get imprinted in our brain (learning and memory) – as well as the interplay between these processes. She used multiple methods to get at those questions, ranging from invasive and non-invasive electrophysiological and neuroimaging methods over behavioral techniques to online surveys. Answering those questions in humans also needs methods advancement, which is another focus of her lab. The most recent one focus is on laminar electrophysiology in humans. Finally, she is committed to team-science and open science practices and she is leading a large-scale adversarial collaboration, involving 11 international collaborators to learn more about the footprints of consciousness and what makes us humans.
