Dagstuhl Seminar

22. – 26. April 2019 the Dagstuhl seminar, I co-organized, on Ethics and Trust: Principles, Verification and Validation in AI and robotics took place. It was a great experience and a really fruitful discussion wrt trustworthy human-robot interaction and machine ethics. Interdisciplinary discourse between computer scientists, philosophers, and roboticists at its best.

I will update the post as soon as the report of the seminar is online (around August)!

“Dagstuhl Seminars are frequently praised by participants as the most productive academic events they have ever experienced. This can be attributed to Dagstuhl’s unique concept: Dagstuhl seminars promote personal interaction and open discussion of results as well as ideas. Unlike at most conferences, the focus is not solely on the presentation of established results but to equal parts on results, ideas, sketches, and open problems. Dagstuhl offers one of Germany’s most comprehensive research libraries for computer science, meeting rooms of all sizes, and modern IT facilities. It has earned a reputation as Informatics Capital throughout the world.” – https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/dagstuhl-seminars/

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Interview on Cobots

The Medical Device Developments magazine interviewed me on my research on cobots. Have a look on page 48ff if you are interested in my thoughts on the future manufacturing world in which humans and robots work shoulder-to-shoulder.

https://secure.viewer.zmags.com/publication/c5c6d62f#/c5c6d62f/48

TU Wien published an interview with me

unfortunately only in German. The whole site is about female young academics.

You can find it here https://www.tuwien.at/tu-wien/organisation/zentrale-services/genderkompetenz/frauenspuren/frauenspuren-heute/nachwuchsforscherinnen/astrid-weiss/

Nicole Mirnig finished her PhD

On March 6, Nicole Mirnig successfully defended her PhD at the Center for HCI, University of Salzburg. Her thesis entitled “Essentials of Robot Feedback-On developing a Taxonomy for Human-Robot Interaction” presents a substantial body of related research and empirical data form a user-centered perspective on how to design feedback strategies in HRI.

Nicole’s overall research aim is to facilitate the design of understandable (social) robots. Her recent research on “imperfect robots” was prominently discussed in the media.

Congrats Nicole. A well-deserved long-overdue career goal is achieved!

Christiana Tsiourti finished her PhD

Christiana Tsiourti came as a visiting PhD researcher for her last year to the V4R group. I was her host supervisor together with Markus Vincze. She did two exciting HRI studies during her stay, one is published at HAI2017 conference and one will soon be published in the Social Robotics Journal. Her PhD thesis is now available online: https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:110600

Now Christiana even took over my “Basics in HRI course” while I am on maternity leave with my second child and I just saw students’ final presentations yesterday….really impressive.

So Christiana keep up with the great work and all the best for your future academic career!

Informal EMCO: Invited Talk

Last week, I gave an invited talk on “The Future of HRI in the care sector” at the 2018 Informal EMCO meeting. The Employment Committee of the European Commission (EMCO) is an advisory committee set up to implement the European Employment Strategy and to promote coordination between Member States on employment and labour market policies.  This year’s topic was Digitalization. Besides another talk of care robotics given by Haus der Barmherzigkeit, a tremendously informative talk was given by Sociology professor Jörg flecker (University Vienna).

PubRob 2018: Invited Talk

This week, I gave my first invited talk with my newborn son (almost 3 months) carried in the baby sling via Skype 🙂 So happy that modern technology makes it possible to contribute to academia while on parental leave.

It was an invited talk on my research on robots in public space at the PubRob 2018 workshop, which was held in conjunction with MobileHCI this year. The presented work was mainly from the EU-project IURO (during my University of Salzburg time). You can find the slides on the workshop website.

This workshop was the fifth in a series of meetings (and the fourth workshop) organised around the theme of public space human-robot interaction. Details of previous events can be found on the PubRob website.