Plenary Speakers
The plenary speakers come from diverse yet closely related disciplines — spanning cognitive neuroscience, human–robot interaction, biohybrid systems, morphing materials, and emotional robotics — offering complementary perspectives that collectively advance the future of soft robotics.
- Tamar Makin (University of Cambridge) — Cognitive Neuroscience
- Gentiane Venture (University of Tokyo) — Shared Life with Robots, Human–Robot Interaction
- Keisuke Morishima (Osaka University) — Wet Robotics, Insect Muscle, Bio-Actuators, Biofuel Cells
- Lining Yao (University of California, Berkeley) — Active/Morphing Materials, Human–Computer Interaction
- Kaname Hayashi (GROOVE X, Inc.) — Emotional Robot “LOVOT,” Entrepreneurship, Robotics Startup
Prof. Gentiane Venture
The Epistemology of Softness: Toward Human-Centered Robotics Beyond Function
Soft robotics has transformed how we design machines — replacing rigid precision with material adaptability and embodied intelligence. Yet softness can also serve as a way of thinking. This talk explores softness not only as a material property, but as an epistemology: a mode of knowing, reasoning, and designing that values flexibility, relationality, and openness to uncertainty.Through examples from our expressive controllers, I will show how a robot’s movements can carry not only functional intent but also presence. By tuning expressivity rather than just precision, we allow machines to inhabit ambiguity — to move in ways that acknowledge human diversity and context rather than impose uniformity.What happens when we see robots not as fixed entities but as floating ontologies that evolve through their encounters with humans? How might a “soft epistemology” help robotics address the complexity of care, labor, and emotion without reducing them to performance metrics? By rethinking softness as a shared framework for engineering and the humanities, we may move toward a truly human-centered robotics — one that recognizes ambiguity and expression as the very conditions of meaningful coexistence with artificial agents.
biography
Gentiane Venture is a French Roboticist working in academia in Tokyo, Japan for more than 20 years. She is a professor at the University of Tokyo and a cross appointed fellow with the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science & Technology. She has established an international research group working on the dynamics of human, robots and the environment. Her group and her work are transdisciplinary to see robotics not as field with applications in certain areas but rather as an art of living together.She has been the lead researcher on several research projects and works in collaboration with industry in Japan and in France such as Kawada robotics, Amada, Fives Intralogistics, Orange, Bouygues. She, her team and their robots have received several awards. In 2022 she was promoted French National Order of Merit.
Prof. Lining Yao
Envisioning Everyday, Everywhere Soft Morphing Robots
How far can we stretch the very idea of a “robot”—to let it live among us, quietly woven into the fabric of daily life?
In this talk, Lining Yao invites the audience to reimagine what robots can be and where they can exist. From farm fields to dining tables, from gardens to living rooms, from the human body to the urban street, her work explores how morphing matter—materials and structures that can sense, compute, and respond—can become a new kind of robotic lifeform: soft, adaptive, and deeply intertwined with human and ecological systems.
Through stories and case studies spanning food, forests, and future materials, the talk reveals how expanding the definition of “robot” opens new pathways for designing technologies that nurture empathy, sustainability, and coexistence. It also reflects on the evolving role of the robotic designer as a boundary-crosser—someone who weaves together science, engineering, and sometimes even art to create machines that are not only intelligent, but also ecologically and socially attuned.
biography
Lining Yao is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, where she directs the Morphing Matter Lab. Her research explores how active and morphing materials can advance sustainable and responsive design for both human and planetary well-being. Her projects are supported by the NSF CAREER Award, DoD MURI, and NSF Growing Convergent Research (GCR) program, among others, and have been featured in Nature, Science Advances, The New York Times, CNN, and Wired.
She earned her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab, previously served on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, and is a Wired UK Fellow, board director of the 4D Printing Society, co-founder of the MorphingMatter4Girls Initiative, a core faculty member of the Berkeley Institute for Robot Design, and an appointed eco-design instructor with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization.
President Kaname Hayashi
Warm Technology
As technology rapidly evolves, the relationship between humans and robots is also entering a new phase. LOVOT, a family robot developed by GROOVE X, is not simply a pursuit of efficiency and convenience, but aims to bring about spiritual enrichment as a “human companion.” In this lecture, founder and CEO Hayashi will explain the “technology that people love” he has arrived at through his experience in automobile and robot development, and the new relationship between humans and robots in the society of the future.
biography
Born in Aichi Prefecture in 1973. Joined Toyota Motor Corporation in 1998, where he was involved in the aerodynamic development of the LFA supercar and F1 cars, before moving on to managing the development of mass-produced vehicles. In 2012, he joined SoftBank and participated in the Pepper project. In 2015, he founded GROOVE X Inc. In December 2018, he announced the family robot LOVOT, which began shipping the following year in 2019. In addition to winning the INNOVATION AWARD at CES 2020, he has received numerous awards, including Refinery29’s BEST OF CES, the Good Design Gold Award, and the WELLBEING AWARDS Gold Impact Award in the Goods & Services category. His publications include Warm Technology: A Story of the Future, which will be released in May 2023.
