Ankit R. Patel is currently associated with the University of Minho, Portugal. He served in various positions at international conferences,  like paper chair for the IEEE/ASME JRC 2025; track chair for the IEEE ITEC 2023, 2024; track co-chairs for the IEEE AFRICON; associate editor for the IFAC CTS 2024; associate chair for the ACM GROUP 2025; global ambassador for the ACM CHI 2024; diversity inclusion and accessibility chair for the ACM COMPASS 2024 and AutomotiveUI 2023; associate chair for the ACM IMX 2023, 2024; associate chair for the ACM AutomotiveUI 2024 and MuC 2024. He also serves as a lead editor for the special issue in the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces; an associate editor for the EAI Endorsed Transactions on Smart Cities and Journal of Social Economic Research; and an editorial board member in the Journal of Sustainable Urban Mobility and Transportation Development Research. He received the best poster paper award at the 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Macau. He also serves as a reviewer in many journals, including Transport; Journal of Transport and Health; and Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour. He reviewed many conferences, including CHI, IMX, AutomotiveUI, MuC, ITS America, OzCHI, INTERACT, TRB, and NordiCHI, among others. His research interests lie in the fields of human factors and interactions, sustainable transportation, travel behavior and psychology, and socially inclusive transportation.

Rafael Gomez (Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia) is Associate Professor of Industrial Design at QUT. He is research theme leader for Mobility Futures under QUT Design Lab, research lead at QUT Industry Training Hub for Mobility and Transport, and Founder and Head of the BMW Group + QUT Design Academy. The BMW Group + QUT Design Academy is founded on three pillars including fostering design excellence, exploring new knowledge horizons and advancing cutting-edge technologies through undergraduate teaching, postgraduate research and collaborative R+D projects between BMW Group in Germany and QUT in Australia. He also works with other leading companies in the mobility and transport space including idealworks, Rolls Royce, Mini, BMW Motorrad, Sime Darby Motors, Beam Mobility, Qld Government Department of Transport and Main Roads, RACQ, and Alstom. 

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Rafael holds a Design PhD with an expertise in emotional experience publishing and presenting his work nationally and internationally as invited speaker and across top-tier design conferences, journals and books. He has developed frameworks to better understand peoples' evolving emotional experience with devices, interfaces, services and systems and research sheds light on the complex relationship between products and well-being with a focus on wearable technology, mobility, and transportation. 

In addition, Rafael has over 15 years industry experience as a designer for small, medium and large enterprises in aviation, construction, medical, health, food, government and consumer electronics industries. He was Founder and Director of Propaganda Mill, a multidisciplinary design company that worked on national and international projects across design.

Pnina Gershon, PhD, is a Research Scientist at MIT AgeLab, Center for Transportation and Logistics, where she co-directs the Advanced Vehicle Technology (AVT) consortium and leads the naturalistic driving research. Dr. Gershon’s research provides the theoretical and applied insights needed to develop solutions to next-generation transportation challenges and advance the future of safe, efficient, accessible, and sustainable mobility. She works closely with the automotive, insurance, and tech industries to deliver data-driven design decisions. Dr. Gershon’s research focuses on the impact of emerging technologies, automated and electrified mobility, driver distraction, impairment, and behaviors of high-risk driver populations on driving safety. Dr. Gershon is an invited member of the National Academies of Sciences Transportation Research Board's Committee on Operator Education and Regulation and a member of the Young and Older Driver Subcommittee. Dr. Gershon received the NIH Fellows Award for Research Excellence (2018) and the NICHD Collaboration Award (2017).

Azra Habibovic is currently Technology Leader for Human Factors and Automation at Scania CV where she is responsible for defining and driving forward Scania’s roadmap for early stage research in these two areas. Prior to joining Scania, Azra was with RISE Research Institutes of Sweden as senior researcher and project leader, and with the research center SAFER as research area director for road user behavior. She holds a PhD in Vehicle Safety Systems (2012) and a MSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering (2006), both from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. Her research focuses on improving traffic safety and user experience by means of automation and connectivity. A special interest is design and evaluation of interactions in and around automated vehicles, including interactions related to remote operation of automated vehicles.

Fjollë Novakazi earned her PhD in Human-Technology-Design in December 2023, completing her research as an industrial candidate at Volvo Cars in collaboration with the Division of Design & Human Factors at Chalmers University of Technology.

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Her thesis explored the factors that influence drivers' perception and consequent understanding of driving automation systems, developing a conceptual model describing how perception shapes understanding and proposing human-centric design solutions to address the identified challenges.

In March 2024, she joined the Centre for Applied Autonomous Sensor Systems (AASS) at Örebro University, as a post-doctoral researcher. Her research examines the interplay between people and technology from a Human Factors perspective, with a particular focus on the cognitive aspects of interactions with automation and robotics. She investigates how human perception shapes these complex interactions, with application areas including mixed-traffic environments and collaborative robotics in manufacturing settings.

Fjollë employs an empirical mixed-methods approach in her work, utilizing surveys, in-depth interviews, co-design workshops, naturalistic studies, field evaluations, ethnographic observations, and more to gather comprehensive insights for her work.

Tram Thi Minh Tran is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Sydney (Australia), working in the Urban Interfaces Lab. She holds both her Master's and PhD degrees from the same university. Her PhD thesis focused on designing scalable interactions between autonomous vehicles and pedestrians in complex traffic scenarios involving multiple road users. Guided by a human-centred design approach, Tram's research primarily focuses on the applications and implications of emerging technologies, including augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and autonomous mobility.

Sakura Akahoshi is a Ph.D. student in Degree Programs in Systems and Information Engineering at University of Tsukuba, Japan.

Her research interests lie in the fields of human factors, authority distribution during automated driving, human-machine collaboration, and trust-building between humans and automated vehicles. Her current research projects focus on exploring new applications to balance the control authority between humans and automation in the design space of human-machine mediator/arbitration. She stayed at RWTH Aachen University, Germany from September 2023 to February 2024 and was engaged in this topic, which she continues to do to this day.
 

The goal of her research is to create and embody a new perspective and/or design philosophy toward a successful collaboration between humans and automation.

Areen Alsaid is an assistant professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and the director of the User State Estimation Laboratory. Before joining UM-Dearborn, she worked as a research scientist and data scientist at Ford Motor Company where she worked on developing in-vehicle technologies to increase trust and acceptance of automated vehicles. Areen earned her PhD in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and MS degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Central Florida.

 Areen’s research focuses on affective computing and user state estimation to facilitate human and automation teaming. She employs statistical methods, machine learning algorithms, and data visualization techniques to understand user cognitive states and develop strategies to improve interactions between humans and technologies. Her work in the automotive industry includes several projects dedicated to estimating critical driver states such as motion sickness, drowsiness, emotions, and trust.

Kyungjoo Cha is a Principal Academic in Product Design (User Experience Design) in the Department of Design & Engineering at Bournemouth University. She possesses PhD in Design Research and Human-Computer Interaction at Brunel University London.

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She previously worked as a design researcher specialising in human-centred design in academia and the commercial sector. She performed several funded research projects focused on user experience design for automobiles sponsored by Jaguar Land Rover at Brunel University London. She recently worked on design research for an autonomous vehicle design partnered with Hyundai and Kia Motors as PI. Before academia, she worked as a consultant in the advertising campaign division of Cheil Worldwide, a Samsung company, which has been the Headquarters of the biggest marketing communication agency in South Korea since 2005. She developed brand campaigns and creative media strategies to make brands and products successful in the market for various clients such as Samsung Life Insurance, Asics Sports and CJ.

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Her current research interests are in using a human-centred speculative approach in the mobility sector to understand the emotional experience. She has performed several funded research projects that focused on user experience design for automobiles and facilitated a series of design workshops for students, commercial designers, and engineers to practice scenario building, emotional experience mapping, and product/system concept generation.