Doctoral Seminar Series on Interaction

October 4th

Affective Engineer, Cambridge Consultants

Emma is a senior affective computing engineer who uses her knowledge of psychology, cognitive science and computer science to create adaptive and empathetic systems. Her expertise is in recognising, analysing, and processing human affects and cognition. Emma holds a MSc and BSc from Simon Fraser University in computer science, specializing in Affective Computing and a BSc (Hons) in Psychology from the University of Victoria.

The talk: How can we transition affective computing to industry in an effective and ethical manner? Potentially, by using games.

October 11th

PhD Student, McGill

Rahatul Amin Ananto is a 3rd year PhD Candidate at McGill University. He works at the Raise Lab as a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researcher under the supervision of Dr. AJung Moon. He completed his master's from the University of Manitoba, and he got his Bachelor’s degree from BRAC University, Bangladesh. His PhD thesis revolves around responsible robotics, where he specifically explores social appropriateness in HRI. He has designed a new social-appropriation-based behavior analysis framework for HRI and is currently in the process of evaluating it by conducting in-the-wild HRI studies.

The talk: Introducing Raise Lab from McGill University. Our lab investigates how interactive intelligent machines influence human behavior and we explore ways to maximize their benefits while minimizing risks to society. 

https://www.raiselab.ca/people/rahatul-amin-ananto

October 18th
Virtual only

Control Engineer, Enchanted Tools

Waldez holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Lorraine, and a M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Currently serving as a control engineer at Enchanted Tools, his research has predominantly focused on whole-body control of humanoid robots, human motor behavior, and human-robot physical interaction.

The talk: 

Physical Interactions: From humans to robots.

How studying biomechanical, and mental aspects of human behavior can positively impact physical human-robot interaction models

https://waldezjr.github.io/

October 25th

PhD Student, USC

Nathan is a final-year Ph.D. Student in Computer Science at USC. Their research focuses on adapting assistive robots to different end users to facilitate positive user experiences. To adapt the robot, Nathan explores how the robot's physical form and behaviors can support users in assistive settings. From the user's perspective, Nathan studies the trade-offs between personalization---automatically adapting to the user without explicit feedback---and customization---directly updating robots based on the feedback users give. Nathan is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and a USC Annenberg Fellowship.

The talk: The first section of this talk will discuss a framework that uses conceptual metaphors as a tool to understand how users interact with robotic systems. The second section will discuss methods for learning models to adapt robot behaviors for users with limited mobility.

https://ndennler.github.io/

November 1st

PhD Student, Hasso Plattner Inst. and audEERING

Pascal Hecker is a healthcare enthusiast and a neuroscientist by training. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Digital Health Cluster, Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, and an AI Researcher in Digital Healthcare and Wellbeing at the audEERING GmbH. Pascal’s research focuses on the quantification of neurological and psychological disorders from voice, as well as the discovery of indicators of wellbeing.

The talk: I will present an overview over my PhD journey so far and the challenges of collecting and analysing healthcare data. Further, I will provide an overview over the topic of affective analysis of voice and the respective research done at the audEERING GmbH.

https://hpi.de/arnrich/people/pascal-hecker.html

https://de.linkedin.com/in/pascal-hecker

November 8th

PhD Student, KTH

Siyang Wang is a final-year PhD student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm Sweden. He is interested in synthesizing speech and gesture for interactive conversational applications. In this talk, He  wants to give an overview of this field with a focus on the central thesis that contextual appropriateness is often ignored in the evaluation of speech and gesture synthesis. As a result, we don't know what progress is really made in this field and what are meaningful challenges remaining. I'll also talk about other's and my own work that address this issue. 

November 15th

PhD Student, University of Cambridge

Minja Axelsson is a graduating PhD student at the University of Cambridge. She researches the user-centred design of robots for robotic mental wellbeing coaches, focusing on their design, user experience, and ethics. She recently undertook a visiting studentship at MIT Media Lab.

The talk: This talk presents a user-centred design process of robots for wellbeing, focusing on workplace applications and ethical considerations.

https://www.minjaaxelsson.com/

https://x.com/minjaaxelsson?lang=en

November 22nd

PhD Student, Ghent University

Ruben Janssens is a last-year PhD researcher at Ghent University in Belgium. He researches how social robots can adapt their conversations to multi-modal input using new artificial intelligence methods, with a special focus on educational robots. He is currently undertaking a research visit at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

The talk: How can we build truly autonomous social robots that work in the real world? Ruben will present various engineering challenges, going from multi-modal language models to speech recognition for children and more, always linking back to the user's experience.

https://www.rubenjanssens.be/

November 27th @ 10 am

PhD Student, KTH

Charlotte Stinkeste is a third-year PhD candidate at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. Her research spans Social Robotics, Behavioral Economics, and Psychology, focusing on how human-like traits in conversational AI—including social robots, voice assistants, and chatbots—shape user interactions with these technologies. Using a behavioral economics framework, she investigates how essential psychological and social factors for meaningful, sustained interactions and decision-making—such as honesty, altruism, and fairness—are influenced by exchanges with conversational agents.

The talk: Charlotte will share initial findings from her research, showcasing if and how the results of the Dictator game, the Ultimatum game, and the Mind game vary depending on the agent in front of us (a study that has gathered +300 participants!)

https://www.kth.se/profile/csti?l=en

https://linkedin.com/in/charlotte-stinkeste

December 6th

PhD Student, University of Aberdeen

Joel is a PhD student at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His research focuses on how robot design, particularly sounds and social cues, affects the human perception and prediction of robot action. He's also investigating how visual perspective taking towards robots differs in face-to-face interactions compared to picture/video presentations, and how this contrasts with our perspective taking towards humans.

https://www.abdn.ac.uk/people/j.currie.22

December 13th

Robotics Specialist, Multimodal Perception and Expression, Enchanted Tools

Thomas works at Enchanted Tools, a new start-up, where he designs an end-to-end interaction pipeline for a new robot to make it able to naturally interact in real environments. He did his Ph.D. at Sorbonne University and Telecom ParisTech on the study of recognition and synthesis of interpersonal stances with virtual agents. 

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=1Zyxg90AAAAJ&hl=en