Changes…

…after my maternity leave, I won’t go back to my old institute (ACIN Institute of Automation and Control) at the TU Wien. After the second trial, I was granted the Elise Richter Programme for senior post-docs from FWF Austrian funding agency.  The Elise-Richter Programme is the follow-up to the Hertha-Firnberg Programme  for “extremely well qualified female scientists who are working towards a career in universities”. So the Austrian academic system gives me another 3 years to prove myself 😉

From October onward I will be affiliated with the Human-Computer Interaction Group Institute for Design and Assessment of Technology. My three-years grant is on research about Long-term Human-Robot Interaction. The project will have its own website as soon as I am officially back at work.

I had a wonderful time at the Vision4Robotics group and will definitively miss my colleagues a lot. However, great things never come from comfort zones…

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TEDx TUWien Talk

Now my TEDx TU Wien talk is online now. You can watch it here:

 

In case you are interested in the research behind the talk you can read it up here:

http://hobbit.acin.tuwien.ac.at/publications/P_NFHRI_Baumgaertner.pdf

Video on my Hertha-Firnberg project

The FWF (Austrian funding agency for fundamental research projects) selected my project for a promotional video. Finally you can watch it, it is unfortunately only in German:

http://scilog.fwf.ac.at/videos/warum-roboter-auf-unterstuetzung-bauen

HRI 2017 in retrospect

So this is it. HRI2017 is finally over. 1.5 years of dedicated work together with Jim Young to put together the best program possible. At least Jim and I are happy with how the program turned out in the end. Clearly, there are some points we wished we could have done differently (eg. having a dedicated video session, having longer companion sessions etc.).

When I received one of the two service awards yesterday (second one went well-deserved to my colleague Markus Bajones!), I was so surprised that I did not say the following I want to share now:

How was it possible for me to be program co-chair while being pregnant and giving birth:

1. I have an incredibly supportive husband
2. From May 2016 onwards I put down almost all other duties (teaching, reviewing, proposal writing etc.)
3. My co-chair Jim Young was incredibly supportive from day one in January, when I told him I was pregnant and can no longer be his co-chair. He convinced me that we can make it work and reduced my workload in times when it would just have been too much.

That was lived gender mainstreaming and he deserves a lot of credit for that, besides all the great work he did for the PC.

So I consider this a shared award for the two of us!

Support a colleague

I am currently advising the work of our visiting researcher Christiana Tsourti.

Please take part in her survey, it is a pre-study to some extensive lab trials and we need some empirical evidence for the experimental design first 🙂

https://www.callforparticipants.com/study/HMPN8/robot-appearance-and-behavior-design

HRI2017 – update

So, I did not want to post during my maternity leave…however, Jim and I put together an exciting program for HRI2017 in Vienna, which is only a few weeks away. Thanks to all our research fellows for submitting their excellent work, it was a pleasure (but also a lot of work :D) to put together the program, you can find it here: http://humanrobotinteraction.org/2017/programme/

Parental Leave

Time for a break…not a 100% break…but priorities will shift in a few weeks from now.

V4R I had a great time with you guys the last 3 years…see you again Oct 2017!