Prof. Mark Billinghurst is Director of the Empathic Computing Laboratory, and Professor at the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia, and the University of Auckland in Auckland, New Zealand. He earned his PhD in 2002 from the University of Washington and conducts research on how virtual and real worlds can be merged, publishing over 650 papers on Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), remote collaboration, Empathic Computing, and related topics. In 2013 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand, and in 2019 was given the ISMAR Career Impact Award in recognition for lifetime contribution to AR research and commercialization. In 2022 he was selected for the ACM SIGCHI Academy, for leading human-computer interaction researchers, and also selected for the IEEE VGTC VR Academy for leading VR researchers.

Dr. Jean Botev is a Senior Research Scientist with a background in Computer Science and Media Studies. He is the founder and director of the VR/AR Lab at the University of Luxembourg (https://vrarlab.uni.lu) and founding member and co-lead of the Collaborative and Socio-Technical Systems (COaST) research group. His award-winning work revolves around fundamental aspects of mediated-reality systems and human-computer interaction. He and his team conduct cross-disciplinary research in various high-profile national and international projects, developing and exploring immersive extended-reality experiences, context-aware applications, and distributed virtual environments. Dr. Botev is a member of various consortia, special interest groups, and committees, including the steering committees of the IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS) and the ACM International Workshop on Immersive Mixed and Virtual Environment Systems (MMVE).