Keynote Speakers

Dr. Warren Bickel joined the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute in 2011 and serves as Director of the Addiction Recovery Research Center and Co-Director of the Center for Transformative Research on Health Behaviors. In recognition of his extraordinary contributions to research and scholarship achievements, Dr. Bickel was recently awarded the Virginia Tech Carilion Behavioral Health Research Endowed Professorship.

He has taught and led research programs at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the University of Vermont, and the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. NIH has funded Dr. Bickel’s work continuously since 1987.

Dr. Bickel is an accomplished scholar and researcher whose accolades include receipt of the 2011 APA International Don Hake Translational Research Distinguished Contributions to Basic Research Award and the 2012 Brady-Schuster Award for Outstanding Behavioral Science Research in Psychopharmacology and Substance Abuse, Division 28 of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Bickel was honored to be the recipient of the 2016 Nathan B. Eddy Award from the College on Problems of Drug Dependence.

Dr. Bickel was Editor of the journal, Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, has co-edited five books, and has published over 400 papers and chapters. Dr. Bickel’s work is frequently cited and receives national and international recognition.

Dr. Elisabeth André is a full professor of Computer Science and Founding Chair of Human-Centered Multimedia at Augsburg University in Germany where she has been since 2001. She has multiple degrees in computer science from Saarland University, including a doctorate. Previously, she was a principal researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI GmbH) in Saarbrücken. Elisabeth André has a long track record in multimodal human-machine interaction, embodied conversational agents, social robotics, affective computing and social signal processing. She has served as a General and Program Co-Chair of major international conferences including International Conference on Antonomous Agents and Multiagent Sytems, ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI) and ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI). In 2010, Elisabeth André was elected a member of the prestigious Academy of Europe, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and AcademiaNet. To honor her achievements in bringing Artificial Intelligence techniques to HCI, she was awarded a EurAI fellowship (European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence) in 2013. Most recently, she was elected to the CHI Academy, an honorary group of leaders in the field of human-computer interaction.