Prof. Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn

This page was updated on 8 May 2013. It is a personal document and does only reflect my own opinions.

I am Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, Technology and Creative Arts at University of Hertfordshire, where I am a coordinator of the Adaptive Systems Research Group. Main areas of my research are Human-Robot Interaction, Social Robotics, Socially Intelligent Agents and Artificial Life, you can find out more about it on this homepage. I am former member of the Department of Biological Cybernetics at University of Bielefeld, Germany, 1990-1993, and AI-Lab at GMD (now Fraunhofer), Sankt Augustin, Germany, 1993-1996, and VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Brussels, Belgium, until end of 1996. From January 1997 to April 2000 Lecturer, Department of Cybernetics at University of Reading, United Kingdom. In April 2000 I joined the Department of Computer Science (now School of Computer Science) at University of Hertfordshire as Principal Lecturer. Later I got promoted to Reader (2001) and then in 2003 to full Professor. I am Editor in Chief (jointly with Prof. Angelo Cangelosi - University of Plymouth) of the Journal Interaction Studies- Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems published by John Benjamins Publishing Company, Associate Editor of Adaptive Behavior, Sage Publications, Associate Editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics, published by Springer and Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development. I am an Editor of the book series Advances in Interaction Studies, published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. I am a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), as well as a member of IEEE, ACM, SSAISB, and the German organisations GI and GK.

See the video that has been produced as part of the University of Hertfordshire Fundraising Campaign for KASPAR - our goal is to raise enough money for a 5-year reearch project into the effectiveness of the robot as a therapeutic tool for children with autism.

See the following videos about our robot companion research in LIREC: The Robot House Showcase (2012), and more details on the Sunflower robot (2011). Sunflower has been designed by Dr. Kheng Lee Koay based on our experience with the first integrated prototype (2010). Within LIREC Dr. Michael L. Walters, in collaboration with artists Alex May and Anna Dumitriu, developed CHARLY.

I am book series editor (jointly with Prof. Angelo Cangelosi - University of Plymouth) of a new book series Advances in Interaction Studies, published by John Benjamins Publishing Company - the book series accompanies the Journal Interaction Studies: Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems, John Benjamins Publishing Company. Editors-in-Chief: Kerstin Dautenhahn and Angelo Cangelosi.

Within the book series Advanced in Interaction Studies I am editing a book on "New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction", co-edited by Dr. Joe Saunders. The book is now available, see the flyer.

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Recent activities in organisation of scientific events:

I organised the Second International Symposium on New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction, a two-day symposium at AISB 2010, 31 March - 1 April 2010, De Montfort University, Leicester, United Kingdom.

I was chair of the AISB 2009 Symposium on New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction, part of the AISB 2009 convention, 8-9 April 2009, Edinburgh, Scotland.

In 2008 I was co-organizer (with Gert Jan Gelderblom and Holly Yanco) of Robotic Helpers: User Interaction, Interfaces and Companions in Assistive and Therapy Robotics, a full-day workshop associated to HRI'08. The workshop was held on 12 March 2008, electronic versions of the proceedings papers are available here.

I was co- general chair (with Terry Fong) of HRI'08, 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 12-15 March 2008, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The conference attracted up to 250 people and was the largest HRI conference to date in terms of paper submissions and conference attendees.

I was general chair of the 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2006), 6-8 September 2006, de Havilland Campus, Hatfield, UK. The theme of Ro-man 2006 was Getting to Know Socially Intelligent Robots. The symposium attracted 200 participants and presented state-of-the-art in human-robot interaction research.

Proceedings of the 10 symposia that ran as part of the AISB 2005 Convention, 12-15 April 2005 at University of Hertfordshire are available online. I was general chair of the convention with the theme Social Intelligence and Interaction in Animals, Robots, and Agents. The convention attracted 300 participants.

Books that I edited:

Now available: Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals: Behavioural, Social and Communicative Dimensions by Chrystopher L. Nehaniv and Kerstin Dautenhahn (Eds.), March 2007

Imitation in Animals and Artifacts, Cambridge, Mass., USA: MIT Press, 2002, editors Kerstin Dautenhahn and Chrystopher L. Nehaniv. See the table of contents.

Socially Intelligent Agents - Creating relationships with computers and robots, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, edited by Kerstin Dautenhahn, Alan Bond, Lola Cañamero, Bruce Edmonds. See the description of content (with ordering information) and table of contents (pdf document).

Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000, edited by Kerstin Dautenhahn. See the description and table of contents.

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You can find out on this page about:

My Research.  PhD projects I am involved in. Short CV. Teaching. News.	Current European Projects: ACCOMPANY (IST - FP7 - STREP). SCRIPT (Supervised Care and Rehabilitation Involving Personal Tele-Robotics).	Long-term project: AURORA - Robots and Autism. We designed a minimally expressive robot KASPAR, described in this article. KASPAR fundraising campaign video. See a Podcast on Robotics and AI on the subject of using robots for therapy and education of children with autism. An article about my work on robot home companions in Computer Science For Fun (CS4Fn) An interview with me on human-robot relationships as part of the Heart project.
My publications, theoretical and experimental work	Some of my academic activities in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013	Interdisciplinary journal Interaction Studies: Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systems
Contact Details	Previous work: The Huegellandschaft scenario, Photos and videos of my work at GMD 1993-1996, work on social robots 1996-1998: Photos of communicating robots . Outdated websites: Links & Literature (last updated May 2000), The Socially Intelligent Agents Webpage (last updated 17 Dec 2003)	Media coverage of my research.

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My Research:

I have been involved in the following European projects, usually as PI, if not otherwise specified.

• Since October 2011 I am PI and deputy coordinator of the 3-year FP7 STREP ACCOMPANY (Acceptable robotiCs COMPanions for AgeiNg Years). Coordinator is my colleage Dr. Farshid Amirabdollahian.
• Since November 2011 I am deputy coordinator of the 3-year FP7 STREP SCRIPT (Supervised Care and Rehabilitation Involving personal Tele-Robotics). Coordinator and PI for UH is my colleage Dr. Farshid Amirabdollahian.

  I am also a member of EUCogII, the 2nd European Network for the Advancement of Artificial Cognitive Systems, Interaction and Robotics. I am also the contact for the UH membership of Europ, the European Robotics Technology Platform.

  Other non-European projects I'm currently involved in

• Walking with Robots, an EPSRC funded Network for Public Engagement for UK robotics research, coordinator is Claire Rocks at UWE
• the Heart project that brings together puppetry and robotics. The project is based at UWE in Bristol and project coordinator is David McGoran.
• I am co-investigator of the public engagement project Robotic Visions, funded by EPSRC, coordinated by UWE with Karen Bultitude as principal investigator.

  Previous European projects.

  • From 2001 - 2004 I was as PI part of the European project VICTEC (Virtual ICT using Empathic Characters in Schools) which developed an interactive virtual environment where through “story-telling” children learn how to cope with bullying. Collaborating institutions were University of Salford (coordinator: Ruth Aylett), INESC, University of Bamberg and Autor.
  • From 2003-2004 I was as PI involved in the spin-off Elvis (E-Learning with Virtual Interactive Synthetic Characters), a European ASIA IT&C project. Partners were University of Salford (coordinator: Ruth Aylett), Zhejiang University, Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon and University of Hertfordshire.
  • From January 2004 to end February 2008 I was as PI part of Cogniron (Cognitive Robot Companion), a FP 6 Integrated Project. Collaborating institutions are LAAS (coordinator: Raja Chatila), University of Bielefeld (Germany), KTH (Sweden), UvA (the Netherlands), Fraunhofer-IPA (Germany), EPFL (Switzerland) and University of Karlsruhe (Germany).
  • From March 2006 to February 2009 I was as PI part of the FP6 STREP e-Circus (Education through characters with emotional-intelligence and role-playing capabilities that understand social interaction). Other partners were Heriot-Watt University, UK (coordinator: Ruth Aylett), INESC-ID (Portugal), Otto-Friedrich-University Bamberg (Germany), University of Sunderland(UK), Augsburg University (Germany), Wuerzburg University (Germany), Interagens(Italy).
  • From September 2004 to end of January 2010 I was as PI involved in the European FP 6 project Robot-Cub, a project in developmental robotics. The project had two goals: has two goals. Firstly, creating an open and freely available humanoid platform for research in embodied cognition, and secondly advancing out understanding of several key issues of cognition by exploiting this platform in the study of cognitive development. Collaborating institutions were University of Genova, LIRA-Lab, IIT (coordinator: Giulio Sandini and Giorgio Metta), Scuola Superiore S. Anna, ARTS Lab, University of Zurich (Artificial Intelligence Lab), University of Uppsala, Department of Psychology, University of Ferrara, Department of Biomedical Science, IST Lisbon - Computer Vision and Robotics Lab, University of Salford, Centre for Robotics and Automation, EPFL, Telerobot S.r.l., European Brain Research Institute.
  • From November 2006 to October 2009 I was as PI part of the FP6 STREP IROMEC (Interactive Robotic Social Mediators as Companions), coordinator was Gernot Kronreif (ARC/Profactor, Vienna). The consortium consisted of: ARC Seibersdorf Research GmbH, University of Hertfordshire, Robosoft SA, Institute for Rehabilitation Research IRV, University of Siena, Universita della Valle d'Aosta, Toy Research Institute, AIJU, Risoluta S.L.L.
  • From May 2008 to April 2012 I was PI part of the FP7 STREP RoboSkin, a 3-year project on Skin-Based Technologies and Capabilities for Safe, Autonomous and Interactive Robots.The UH researchers worked with KASPAR, a child-sized humanoid robot developed by the Adaptive Systems research group at the University. The robot is currently being used by our team to encourage social interaction skills in children with autism. KASPAR was covered with robotic skin and embedded tactile sensors and develop new sensor technologies which can provide tactile feedback from areas of the robot’s body. The goal is to make the robot able to respond to different styles of how the children play with KASPAR in order to help the children to develop ‘socially appropriate’ playful interaction (e.g. not too aggressive) when interacting with the robot and other people. The UH academic team included Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn, Dr. Daniel Polani, Dr. Ben Robins and Dr. Farshid Amirabdollahian. RoboSkin was co-ordinated by Professor Giorgio Cannata of Università di Genova (Italy). Other partners in the consortium include: Università di Genova, Ecole Polytechnique Federale Lausanne, Italian Institute of Technology, University of Wales at Newport and Università di Cagliari.
  • From March 2008 to February 2012 I was part of the FP7 IP ITalk (Integration and Transfer of Action and Language Knowledge in Robot), a four year project coordinated by University of Plymouth (Prof. Angelo Cangelos. The ITALK project aims to develop artificial embodied agents able to acquire complex behavioural, cognitive, and linguistic skills through individual and social learning. This was achieved through the development of cognitive robots that learn to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt their abilities to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions. Other partners included IIT (Italy), University of Bielefeld (Germany), Research Council Rome (Italy), University of Southern Denmark (Denmark), RIKEN Brain Science Institute (Japan)
  • From March 2008 to end of August 2012 I was PI as part of the FP7 IP LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions), a 54-month project coordinated by Prof. Peter McOwan at Queen Mary, University of London (UK).

My research interest in socially intelligent agents (and mechanisms like social learning/imitation, story-telling, interactive emergence, robot-human interaction, mindreading) led to the project AURORA (Autonomous robotic platform as a remedial tool for children with autism) which aims to 1) develop a novel human-robot interface, and 2) make a contribution to use mobile robots as rehabilitation and teaching devices. 

My research goals are the investigation of social intelligence and individual interactions in groups of autonomous agents, including humans and other animals, software agents and robots. This includes different kind of "social interactions" and cooperation, including movements, communication, the role of "internal states" and memory (in particular "story-telling" as a central element of human remembering and dialogue), and embodiment for intelligent behaviour, and the way other agents interpret the behaviour and "intentions" of human-made artifacts.  

My research background and interests are very interdisciplinary and I hope that I can merge different kinds of knowledge and methodologies in order to produce interesting artifacts. They will never be as complex and beautiful as natural living systems, but they should behave in a way which makes them useful and acceptable for humans, acceptable for me. These systems will not be copies of humans or animals, they will always be different, because of the different organization of the material their bodies consist of. But they should behave in a way which is compatible to humans, I want them to be integrated in human society, a "multi-species" society. I am thinking hard about how to implement the phenomenological dimension of social intelligence and understanding in concrete computer programs and robot designs. Body and mind emerged from the same kind of matter, they are two aspects of the same complex organization of material. That's my conception of embodiment. And social understanding and communication is rooted in the "empathic" re-experiencing occurring between such systems. That's in short my "philosophy of thinking" which I'm describing in more detail in my papers. But it's not sufficient to think out concepts, these systems have to be built! That's what keeps me busy. 

My current and future robotic interests also include explicit communication ("language" in terms of communicative signals, grounded in embodied agents and social interactions), studies on "body language" (non-verbal communication between agents, focusing on synchronization and coordination of movements for communicative purposes), social learning mechanisms supporting the emergence of "individuality" and "autobiographic agents". All this will be centered around the basic artificial life idea on studying the development and emergence (yes, I dare to use this term) of (social) complexity involving artificial matter and agents. 

With respect to robot-human interaction I think in terms of building robots as "friendly" partners, showing interesting behaviours and/or dynamic types of movement: robots as toys to entertain people and help children with special needs to relate to the environment, see project AURORA, or service robots as helpful assistants and companions in home scenarios.

A vision from 1996 on Robot-human relationships is described here.

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Contact details:

Prof. Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn
Adaptive Systems Research Group
The University of Hertfordshire
School of Computer Science
College Lane
Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB
United Kingdom

E-mail: K "DOT" Dautenhahn "AT" herts.ac.uk

Fax: +44-1707-284-303
Tel: +44-1707-284-333 (I am very often in the laboratory, meetings or off-site and not reachable by phone, the best way to contact me is by email)

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Some of my academic activities in 2013:

• Awards co-chair of ICSR 2013, International Conference on Social Robotics, 27-29 October 2013, Bristol, UK
• Workshop/Tutorial Co-chair of IEEE RO-MAN 2013, August 26-29 2013, Gyeongju, Korea
• Plenary Keynote Speaker at CogInfoCom 2013 Conference, 4th IEEE International Conference on Cognitive Infocommunications, 2-5 December 2013, Budapest, Hungary. Title of my talk: "Interacting with Robots - Challenges for Robot Companions".
• Invited speaker at Technical University of Chemnitz, Germany, talk entitled "Challenges in Human-Robot Interaction", 3 May 2013, following by a workshop/discussion round with PhD students of the CrossWorlds - DFG-Graduiertenkolleg at TU Chemnitz
• Lecturer at International Summer School on Social Human-Robot Interaction, Christ's college, Monday 26th – Friday 30th August.
• Lecturer at Summer School on Social Signal Processing, on behalf of SSPNet, the European Network of Excellence on SSP, 3-7 June 2013, Vietri Sul Mare, Italy.
• Invited Keynote Speaker at COST Event - The Future Concept and Reality of Social Robotics: Challenges, Perception and Applications Role of Social Robotics in Current and Future Society, International Press Centre, Brussels (BE), 10-13 June 2013. Title of my talk is "Social robotics and real world applications – an interdisciplinary perspective".
• Speaker at Bentley Wood High School, part of the Speakers for Schools programme, 11 February 2013, title of talk "Robots Interacting with People".
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • KI 2013, 36th Germany Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16-20th September 2013, Koblenz, Germany
  • IEEE ALIFE 2013, 2013 IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life, April 16-17, Singapore
  • Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative, 4-6 August, Hamburg, Germany.
  • ACII 2013, Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, 205 September 2013, Geneva, Switzerland
  • Member of reviewing committee IEEE ICORR 2013, International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, 24-26 June, Seattle, Washington, USA.
  • 5th International Workshop on Affective Interaction in Natural Environments (AFFINE): Interacting with Affective Artefacts in the Wild, Geneva, 2 September 2012
  • Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction 2013, 2-5 September 2013, Geneva, Switzerland, ACII
  • ECAL 2013, 12th European Conference on Artificial Life, September 206, 2013, Taormina, Italy
  • 14th Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS), 28030 August 2013, St. Anne's College, Oxford, UK
  • Member of the Scientific Board of AAATE 2013, 12th European AAAATE Conference, 19-22 September, 2013, Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal

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Some of my academic activities in 2012:

• I am lecturer at the Interdisciplinary College IK2012 in Guenne at Lake Mohne in Germany, 16-23 March 2012. My lectures will cover the topic of human-robot interaction.
• I will be a plenary speaker at the CITECH Graduate Summer School on "Verbal and non-verbal interaction: from experiments to implementation", 27-31 August, 2012, Bielefeld, Germany. Title of my presentation "Learning and Playing with KASPAR: Robot-Assisted Therapy for Children with Autism"
• I am a keynote speaker at the Research Symposium T100 - Celebrating 100 years since the birth of Alan Turing, 11th May 2012, Edinburgh.
• I was an invited speaker at the KT-EQUAL workshop on Showcasing research to promote active ageing: from Rehabilitation robots to Assistive technologies and beyond, 19 October 2012, Hatfield, UK. The title of my presentation was "Robots helping elderly independence, is that a reality?".
• I am a panel speaker at the Women in Computing Panel, 10 May 2012, Edinburgh.
• Invited seminar speaker at University of Plymouth on 14 September 2012, title of my presentation "Social Robots as Assistive Tools"
• I was invited keynote speaker at the 5th York Doctoral Symposium on Computer Science, 8th November, 2012, title of my talk: Social Robots as Assistants. >
• I was invited speaker at the Liverpool Symposium on Legal, Ethical and Social Autonomous Systems, 14th November 2012, Forsight Centre, University of Liverpool. The title of my presentation was "Problems with Social Robotics? Challenges!".
• I am organising a special session, jointly with Dr. Ben Robins, on "Situated Interaction and Embodiment - the use of social robotic systems in education and care for people with special needs" at ICSR 2012, International Conference on Social Robotics, 29-31 October, Chengdu, China.
• I am giving a seminar entitled "Interaction Studies with Robot Home Companions" at University of Sheffield on 29 February 2012.
• I am editing a book on "New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction", co-edited by Dr. Joe Saunders. The book is now available, see the flyer.
• I am invited speaker at the IROS 2012 workshop on "Cognitive neuroscience robotics", 12 October 2012, as part of IROS 2012, October 7-12, 2012, Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal. The workshop is being organised by Kenichi Narioka (Osaka University), Yukie Nagai (Osaka University), Minoru Asada (Osaka University), and Hiroshi Ishiguro (Osaka University). Title of my presentation "Interaction with Robot Companions – Psychological and Neuro-Biological Factors".
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • SAB2012, the 12th International Conference on Adaptive Behaviour, Odense, Denmark, 27-31 August 2012.
  • FIRA TAROS 2012, 20-25 August 2012, Bristol Robotics Laboratory, Bristol, UK.
  • The ROBOSKIN Project: Results and Future Challenges, 21 February 2012, Vienna, a workshop at CogSys 2012 – 5th International Conference on Cognitive Systems.
  • Workshop EEA - Emotional and Empathic Agents, at AAMAS, 4-8 June, 2012, Valencia, Spain.
  • Workshop on: Advances in Tactile Sensing and Touch based Human-Robot Interaction, a workshop at 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2012), Boston, USA, March 5-8, 2012
  • The Fifth International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions, ACHI 2012, January 30 - February 4, 2012 - Valencia, Spain
  • Artificial Life 13, 13th International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, 19-22 July 2012, Michigan, USA.
  • Third international workshop on Human Behavior Understanding, 7 October 2012, a workshop at IROS 2012, Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, 7-12 October 2012.
  • Workshop on Motivational Aspects of Robotics in Physical Therapy, 12 October 2012, at IROS 2012, Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, 7-12 October 2012.
  • 2012 ASE International Conference on Social Informatics, Washington, D. C., USA, 14-16 December, 2012.
  • 2012 ASE/IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, September 3-6, 2012.
  • KI 2012, 35th German Conference on Artificial Intelligence September 24-27, 2012, Saarbrücken, Germany

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Some of my academic activities in 2011:

• As part of the book series Advances in Interaction Studies, published by John Benjamins Publishing Company I am editing a book on "New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction", co-edited by Dr. Joe Saunders.
• I am in the Organising Comittee of HRI 2011, the 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, March 6-9, 2011, Lausanne, Switzlerland. I'm Workshop/Tutorials co-chair together with Adriana Tapus.
• I am invited speaker at the Fourth International Expert Days on Service Robotics, February 23-24, 2011, Hausen, Germany. A video statement on the event can be found on youtube. The title of my talk on the 23rd February is "Case Studies on Research on Robot Companions".
• I am co-organiser of a workshop entitled Robots with Children at HRI 2011, co-organisers are Naomi Miyake, Hiroshi Ishiguro and Tatsuya Nomura.
• On the 5th May 2011 I was invited speaker at the Center of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) at University of Bielefeld in Germany. The title of my talk was "Facilitating Social Interaction with Robot Companions".
• I am invited speaker at the Humanity+ UK event organised at Birkbeck College in London on Saturday 8th October. The theme of the event will be "Beyond Human: Rethinking the Technological Extension of the Human Condition". My talk is entitled "Robots as helpful companions?”.
• I was invited speaker at the Robot Speak event in the London Science Museum, 4th December 2011. The title of my talk was "Human-Robot Interaction and Autism". This was part of the Robotville event in the London Science Museum from 1st to 4th of December 2011 where we presented our CHARLY and KASPAR robots and associated research. See a video1 and video2.
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • IEEE ALIFE 2011, The 2011 IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life, April 13-15 2011, Paris, France
  • ACII 2011, Memphis, Tennessee, 9-12 October 2011
  • Taros 2011, 12th Conference Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems, 31 August - 2 September 2011, Sheffield, UK.
  • 2011 IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Agents (IA 2011) which will take place within the the 2011 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI 2011), Paris, France, 11-15 April 2011.
  • GECCO 2011, 12-16 July 2011, Dublin, Ireland
  • ICDL 2011, 26-30 June 2011, Trondheim, Norway
  • Reviewer for ICORR 2011, International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics, 29 June - 1 July 2011, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • BICA 2011, Annual International Conference on Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures Arlington, Virginia: November 5–6, 2011.
  • ICCV HCI 2011 workshop Human Computer Interaction: Real-Time Vision Aspects of Natural User Interfaces, November 7, 2011, Barcelona, Spain.

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Some of my academic activities in 2010:

• Chair of the Second International Symposium on New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction, part of the AISB 2010 convention, 31 March - 1 April 2010, Leicester, Scotland
• Invited Plenary Speaker at the Twentieth European Meeting on Cybernetics and Systems Research (EMCSR) on 6 - 9 April 2010 at the University of Vienna, organized by the Austrian Society for Cybernetic Studies. My talk is scheduled for the 9th April. I was invited by Prof. Robert Trappl. The title of my presentation is "Robotic Helpers: Interaction, Interfaces and Companions in Assistive and Therapy Robots".
• Invited keynote speaker at the Third Conference on Human-Robot Personal Relationships, organized by the Mediatechology department of the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, 23-24 June 2010. My talk is scheduled for the 24th June 2010 and is entitled "What type of social relationships with robots do we need? Case studies from human-robot interaction research. At the event I was interviewed by Dutch Television, please see the interview with me here.
• Invited keynote speaker at a 5-day workshop on Human-Agent-Robot Teams. The workshop will take place from 13-17 December 2010 at the Lorentz Center (in Leiden, the Netherlands. The workshop is being organized by Virginia Dignum and Jeff Bradshaw.
• Invited Keynote speaker at the 7th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral research (Measuring Behavior 2010), 24 - 27 August 2010 in Eindhoven. My talk is scheduled on 26th August 2010 and is entitled "Measuring Behaviour in Human-Robot Interaction Studies".
• Keynote speaker at the International Conference on Playware and Robotics, part of the Copenhagen Playware Meeting, 9-10 September 2010, organised by Prof. Henrik Hautop Lund. I'll give a public lecture on the 9th September 2010 entitled: "Robots as therapeutic toys- the role of tactile interaction".
• Panel Speaker at Rise of the Machines event on 15 October 2010, organised by the Royal Society. See more links 1, 2, 3, 4. The Royal Society organises this meeting together with SCI-FI-LONDON, London’s Festival of Science Fiction, as part of the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary celebrations in 2010.
• Invited participant of the Artificial Intelligence Lunch Debate, Monday 28th June 2010, London, organised by NESTA, part of the project "Robots and Avatars – our colleagues and playmates of the future".
• Co-organiser (together with Ben Robins, Gernot Kronreif and Patrizia Marti) of a tutorial on Robots for children with special needs: technology and design challenges for an effective integration in therapeutic and educational environments at IEEE ICRA, May 3-8, 2010, Anchorage, Alaska
• Invited Lecture on 5th May 2010 in seminar organised by the Evolutionary Anthropology Research Group at Durham University, UK. Title of my talk "Companion Robots as Assistants or Therapeutic Tools".
• Invited keynote speaker in the Institute of Physics Lecture Series, organised at University of Hertfordshire by Prof. Alan Davies. The lecture took place on 27 January 2010, title of the presentation was "Robot Companions in Social and Healthcare Robotics".
• Co-organising, with Patrizia Marti (University of Siena, Italy) a special sesssion on Re-Thinking Interaction with Robots at IEEE RO-MAN 2010, 19th IEEE International Symposium in Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Sep. 12 - 15th, 2010, Viareggio, Italy
• Co-organising, with Ben Robins, a special session on Human-Robot Social and Assistive Interaction - design and implementation challenges in the use of HRI in assistive technologies for people with special needs at ICSR 2010, the International Conference on Social Robotics. 23-24 November 2010, Singapore.
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • The Third International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions ACHI 2010 February 10-16, 2010 - St. Maarten, Netherlands Antilles
  • The 11th International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior SAB 2010, Paris, France 24-28 August 2010.
  • International Conference on Social Robotics ICSR2010, Singapore, November 23-24 2010. I am also member of the Robot Design Competition Jury.
  • 9th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning ICDL 2010, 18-21 August 2010, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
  • HCI 2010, 6th-10th September 2010, University of Abertay Dundee, Scotland
  • Alife 12, 12th International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT) at University of Southern Denmark (SDU), August 19-23, 2010.
  • AFFINE 2010, a workshop taking place at ACM Multimedia 2010 this October - http://www.acmmm10.org/. Affective Multimodal Interaction in Natural Environments.
  • HCI 2010, 24th BCS Conference on Human Computer Interaction, 6-10 September 2010, University of Abertay Dundee, Scotland.
  • 1st International conference on Applied Bionics and Biomechanics (ICABB-2010), Venice, Italy, October 14-16, 2010.

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Some of my academic activities in 2009:

• Chair of the AISB 2009 Symposium on New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction, part of the AISB 2009 convention, 8-9 April 2009, Edinburgh, Scotland
• Co-organiser, with Dr. Farshid Amirabdollahian (UH), Prof. Gail Mountain (KT-EQUAL Director) and Verity Smith (KT-EQUAL Cordinator) of the one-day workshop Robots supporting personal independence and rehabilitation - potentials and possibilities, Ramada Jarvis Hotel, Hatfield, 24 November 2009. Sponsored by KT-EQUAL.
• Organising special session "Companion robots in Eldercare" at IEEE ICORR 2009, co-organiser: Dr. Farshid Amirabdollahian
• Editing a special journal issue on "Robots in the Wild: Exploring Human-Robot Interaction in Naturalistic Environments" for the journal Interaction Studies.
• Co-organising (with Dr. Ben Robins) a special session on "From Isolation to Social Inclusion: the use of robots in play for children with cognitive or physical disabilities" at IEEE ICORR 2009
• Organising a tutorial at IEEE RO-MAN 2009 on "Developing assistive technologies for children and adults with special needs: A user-centred approach", together with Dr. Ben Robins, Prof. Kazuyoshi Wada and Prof. Patrizia Marti.
• Keynote speaker at the AISB 2009 Convention, Edinburgh, my talk is scheduled for the 8th April 2009, title of the presentation "Is there a Future for Robot Companions?". The talk is also part of the Edinburgh Science Festival.
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • VRIC 2009, 22-26 April 2009, Symposium on The Philosophy of Identify in the Virtual.
  • IEEE Alife, Second IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life, to be held in Nashville, Tennessee, USA as part of the 2009 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI) March 30-April 2, 2009.
  • ACII 2009, 2009 International Conferenceon Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, September 10-12, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
  • ACHI 2009, The Second International Conferences on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions February 1-6, 2009 - Cancun, Mexico
  • Experimental Design for Real-World Systems, a AAAI Spring 2009 Symposium, March 23-25, Palo Alto, CA
  • IEEE Humanoids, The 9th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids09), December 7-10, 2009, Paris, France.
  • AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II, March 23-25, 2009, Stanford University, USA.
  • AAAI Spring Symposium 2009 on Experiment design for real world systems, March 23-25 Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA
  • ICDL 2009, IEEE 8th International Conference on Development and Learning, Shanghai, China, June 5-7, 2009.
  • Beyond Gray Droids: Domestic Robot Design for the 21st Century Workshop at HCI 2009, 1 September 2009, Cambridge, UK

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Some of my academic activities in 2008:

• Chair of the AISB 2009 Symposium on New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction, part of the AISB 2009 convention, 8-9 April 2009, Edinburgh, Scotland
• One of three keynote speakers at the Parliamentary Reception on Robotics entitled "Intelligent Robots in Science and Society", 22 April, 2008, Members' Dining Room, House of Commons, London (an event initiated by Walking with Robots). The title of my presentation was "Social and Health Care Robotics".
• Invited expert speaker at the workshop "Future Robotics for Healthcare" as part of a project funded by the European Commission: Road map on Robotics for Healthcare (R4H), 23-24 April 2008. The title of my presentation was "Therapy: Robotized cognitive, mental and social therapy systems".
• Keynote speaker at 14th Annual Meeting of the Society in Europe for Simulation Applied to Medicine, June 19-21, 2008, Hatfield, UK. Title of presentation: "KASPAR: A humanoid robot used in healthcare applications and robotics research".
• Keynote speaker at a Symposium on Robots & Rights: Will artificial intelligence change the meaning of human rights? organised by The Centre for Bioethics and Public Policy, Tuesday 15th January 2008 3-6pm, The Royal Society of Medicine. Title of talk "Robots as Artificial Beings? – A Human-Robot Interaction Viewpoint"
• General chair (with Terry Fong) of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI'08), 12-15 March 2008, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, theme "Living with Robots".
• Co-organizer (with Gert Jan Gelderblom and Holly Yanco) of Robotic Helpers: User Interaction, Interfaces and Companions in Assistive and Therapy Robotics, a full-day workshop associated to HRI'08. The workshop will be held on 12 March 2008.
• co-organiser of workshop on Robots as Social Actors: Evaluating Social Acceptance and Societal Impact of Robotic Agents, 1 August 2008, as part of IEEE RO-MAN 2008 (The 17th International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication), Munich, Germany. Main organiser: Astrid Weiss, other co-organisers: Manfred Tscheligi and Aude Billard.
• Invited speaker at workshop on Cognition for Technical Systems, 1 August 2008, as part of IEEE RO-MAN 2008 (The 17th International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication), Munich, Germany. The workshop organizers: Michael Beetz and Dirk Wollherr. Title of my presentation: Social cognition for robot companions: A user perspective.
• Invited speaker at IEEE IROS workshop on Robot Services in Aging Society, 26 September 2008, Nice, France. Workshop organizers: Martin Buss, Henrik Christensen, Yoshihiko Nakamura. Title of my presentation: Will users accept socially interactive robots as assistive companions? Obstacles, opportunities and open research challenges.
• Editing a special issue of the journal Interaction Studies on "Robots in the Wild: Exploring Human-Robot Interaction in Naturalistic Environments".
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • Humanoids 2008, December 1-3, 2008, Daejeon, Korea
  • SAB 2008, The tenth International Conference on the Simluation of Adaptive Behavior, 7-12, July 2008, Osaka, Japan
  • Artificial Life XI, Winchester, UK, 5-8 August 2008
  • IEEE RO-MAN 2008, 1-3 August 2008, Technische Universitat Munchen, Munich, Germany
  • Agent cognitive ability and orders of emergence, a symposium at AISB 2008, April 1-4, 2008, Aberdeen, Scotland
  • Epirob 2008, 31 July - 2 August, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK
  • IEEE 7th International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL), Monterey, California, August 9th-12th, 2008
  • IEEE Alife, Second IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life, to be held in Nashville, Tennessee, USA as part of the 2009 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI) March 30-April 2, 2009.
  • GWAL 2008, 8th German Workshop on Artificial Life, University of Leipzig, Germany, 30 July - 1 August 2008.
  • Workshop on Affective Interaction in Natural Environments (AFFINE) at ICMI 2008 (Tenth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces), Chania, Crete, Greece, October 24, 2008 Post-conference workshop of ICMI 2008
  • ACHI 2009, The Second International Conferences on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions February 1-6, 2009 - Cancun, Mexico
  • Experimental Design for Real-World Systems, a AAAI Spring 2009 Symposium, March 23-25, Palo Alto, CA
  • Social interaction through physical play workshop, Wednesday 22nd of October Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
  • AAAI Symposium on Intelligent Narrative Technologies II, March 23-25, 2009, Stanford University, USA.
  • AAAI Spring Symposium 2009 on Experiment design for real world systems, March 23-25 Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA

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Some of my academic activities in 2007:

• General chair (with Terry Fong) of the 3rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI'08), 12-15 March 2008, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, theme "Living with Robots".
• Invited Keynote Speaker at IEEE ICDL 2007, 6th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning, 11-13 July 2007, London, UK
• Invited Keynote Speaker at IEEE ICORR 2007, 13-15 June 2007, Noordwijk, the Netherlands
• Invited Lecturer at 5th European Neuro-IT and Neuroengineering School, July 15-20, 2007, at the Hanse-Institute for Advanced Study (http://www.h-w-k.de/) at Delmenhorst, Germany.
• Organizing committee of Multidisciplinary Collaboration for Socially Assistive Robotics, American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 2007 Spring Symposium Series Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, March 26-28, 2007
• Organising a special session on "Robot assisted play", together with Ben Robins, at IEEE RO-MAN 2007, 26-29 August 2007, Jeju island, Korea
• Organising a special session on "Cognitive Architectures for Interaction and Narrative", together with Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, at IEEE ICDL 2007, 11-13 July 2007, London, UK
• Organising a special session on "Learning and Interaction in Children with Autism", together with Ben Robins, at IEEE ICDL 2007, 11-13 July 2007, London, UK
• Editing a special journal issue: International Journal of Advanced Robotics Systems, Special Issue on Human-Robot Interaction, K. Dautenhahn and C. L. Nehaniv (guest editors), Vol. 1, Issue 4, pp. 102-150, March 2007. [ISSN 1729-8806]
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • AISB'07 Symposium on Mindful Environments, organised by Dirk Heylen and Stacy Marsella
  • AISB'07 4th International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts, organised by Jose Santos-Victor, Manuel Lopes, Alexandre Bernardino. I'm also member of the Steering Committee
  • GECCO'2007, July 7-11th in London, UK.
  • Second International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII 2007), September 12-14, 2007, Lisbon, Portugal
  • 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, March 9-11 2007,Washington DC, USA
  • IEEE ICORR 2007, 13-15 June 2007, Noordwijk, the Netherlands
  • IEEE RO-MAN 2007, 26-29 August 2007, Jeju island, Korea
  • SID 2007, The 6th International Workshop on Social Intelligence Design SID 2007, Trento, Italy, July 2-4, 2007
  • ECAL 2007, 9th European Conference on Artificial Life, September 10-14, 2007 Lisbon, Portugal
  • IEEE ICDL 2007, 6th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning, 11-13 July 2007, London, UK
  • 7th International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics, 5-7 November, 2007, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, USA

UP

Some of my academic activities in 2006:

• I am general chair of the 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2006), 6-8 September 2006, de Havilland Campus, Hatfield, UK. The theme of Ro-man 2006 is Getting to Know Socially Intelligent Robots.
• Invited speaker at the Royal Society Discussion meeting 'Social intelligence: From brain to culture' in May 2006.
• Invited speaker of Cognitive Robotics, Intelligence and Control workshop, 16th to 18th August 2006, Windsor, England, UK
• Senior Program Committee member of HRI 2007, the 2nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, March 9-11, 2007, Washington DC, USA
• Member of the Organizing Committee of AAAI 2007 Symposium on Multidisciplinary Collaboration for Socially Assistive Robotics, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, March 26-28, 2007
• Invited speaker at the workshop on Embodied Communication,, Bielefeld, Germany
• Presenter at the AI Summit, the 50th Anniversary Summit of Artificial Intelligence, Monte Verita, Switzerland, 9-14 July 2006
• I am co-editor of the following book: C. L. Nehaniv & K. Dautenhahn (Eds.), Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals: Behavioural, Social and Communicative Dimensions, Cambridge University Press, in press.
• I am in the Senior Program Committee of HRI 2006, the 1st Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, March 2-3, 2006, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • AlifeX, The 10th International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, June 3-7, 2006, School of Informatics, Indiana University, Bloomington
  • IVA2006, The 6th International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 21st-23rd August 2006, Marina del Rey, CA, USA
  • SAB'06, From Animals to Animats 9, The Ninth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB'06), 25 - 30 September 2006, CNR, Roma, Italy
  • Humanoids 2006, 2006 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 4-6 December 2006, Genova, Faculty of Engineering, University of Genova, Italy
  • Epigenetic Robotics 2006, September 20-22 2006, Hospital "La Salpetriere".

UP

Some of my academic activities in 2005:

• I was General Chair of the AISB 2005 Convention: Social Intelligence and Interaction in Animals, Robots, and Agents:, 12-15 April 2005, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK. This was the larget AISB convention ever hosting 10 symposia relevant to the general theme and attracted 299 participants. The proceedings of the symosia are available online: . I co-chaired (with Rene te Boekhorst) the symposium Robot Companions: Hard Problems and Open Challenges in Robot-Human Interaction and was programme co-chair (with Chrystopher Nehaniv) of the Third International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts - chair is Yiannis Demiris.
• Programme co-chair of the Third International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts at AISB 2005
• co-organizer of symposum Robot Companions: Hard Problems and Open Challenges in Human-Robot Interaction at AISB2005
• Organizing committee of Towards Social Mechanisms of Android Science, (at CogSci 2005), Stresa, Italy, 25-26 July 2005
• Organising (with Chrystopher Nehaniv) a special session on "Robot Companions" at IEEE Ro-man2005, 14th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, August 13-15, 2005 Marriott at Vanderbilt 2555 West End Ave. Nashville, TN 37203 USA
• Reviewer for IJCAI 2005, Nineteenth Interactional Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 30 July -5 August 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland
• Co-organizer of a special session on Human-Robot Interaction CIRA2005, 6th IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation - Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland - June 27-30, 2005
• presenter of half-day tutorial on "Challenges in Human-Robot Interaction" at CIRA2005, 6th IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation - Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland - June 27-30, 2005
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation: Robots get closer to Humans, ICRA 2005, April 18-22, 2005, Barcelona, Spain
  • IEEE Ro-man2005, 14th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, August 13-15, 2005 Marriott at Vanderbilt 2555 West End Ave. Nashville, TN 37203 USA
  • IEEE Ro-man 2005, 4th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, August 13-15, 2005, Marriott at Vanderbilt, Nashville, USA
  • The Fourth International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-05), Osaka, Japan at INTEX Osaka, July 19-21, 2005
  • CIRA2005, 6th IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation - Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland - June 27-30, 2005
  • Epirob2005, Fifth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics, 22-24 July 2005, Nara, Japan
  • IVA'05, The 5th International Working Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, September 12-14, 2005 Kos, Greece
  • ECAL2005, The VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life, September 5-9, 2005, Canterbury, England
  • The 5th International working conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2005), September 12-14, 2005 Kos, Greece
  • Creating bonds with Humanoids, a workshop at AAMAS 2005 (25-29 July 2005), Utrecht University, the Netherlands

UP

Some of my academic activities in 2004:

• Invited speaker at Third International Workshop on Social Intelligence Design, SID 2004, July 3-5, 2004, University of Twente, Enschede, the Netherlands
• Invited speaker at IEEE Ro-man 2004, 13th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication September 20-22, 2004 Kurashiki, Okayama Japan.
• Invited speaker at the 10th Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology, "Modeling Biology", organised by Gerd Muller and Luciano da Fontura Costa at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research.
• Invited speaker at BNAIC2004, 16th Belgian-Dutch Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Groningen, The Netherlands, 21-22 October, 2004.
• Invited speaker at IFIP-WCC, 18 th IFIP World Computer Congress, Topical Day on Social Robots: Challenges for Machine Intelligence, organised by Georges Giralt and Raja Chatila, Toulouse France 22-27 August 2004
• General chair of AISB 2005 Convention, 12-15 April 2005, University of Hertfordshire, de Havilland Campus, Hatfield, UK. The convention is hosted by the Adaptive Systems Research Group at University of Hertfordshire, on behalf of The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (SSAISB) which is the largest Artificial Intelligence Society in the United Kingdom. At the convention, I'm also co-chair (with Rene te Boekhorst) of the symposium Robot Companions: Hard Problems and Open Challenges in Robot-Human Interaction, as well as programme co-chair (with Chrystopher Nehaniv) of the Third International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts - chair is Yiannis Demiris.
• Editing a book, together with Chrystopher Nehaniv on "Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals: Behavioural, Social and Communicative Dimensions", Cambridge University Press.
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • IAS-8: 8th Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems, March 10-13, 2004, Amsterdam, NL
  • From Animals to Animats 8, The Eighth International Conference on the SIMULATION OF ADAPTIVE BEHAVIOR (SAB'04), 13-17 July 2004, Los Angeles, USA
  • Artificial Life IX, The Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Boston, USA, 12-15 September 2004
  • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation: Robots get closer to Humans, ICRA 2005, April 18-22, 2005, Barcelona, Spain
  • IJCAI 2005, Nineteenth Interactional Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 30 July -5 August 2005, Edinburgh, Scotland
  • EPIROB2004, Fourth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems, August 25-27, 2004, LIRA-Lab, University of Genoa, Italy
  • ICDVRAT 2004, 5th International Conference on Disability, Virtual Reality and Associated Technologies, 20-22 September 2004, New College, Oxford, UK.
  • Seventh International Workshop on: Trust in Agent Societies, to be held at Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems Conference (AAMAS 2004) July 19 (or) 20, 2004. New York, USA
  • International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment - TIDSE 2004, June 24-26 2004, Darmstadt, Germany.
  • International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL'04), San Diego, California (Salk Institute, La Jolla), October 20-22, 2004.
  • XVII Brazilian Symposium on Artificial Intelligence, September 29 - October 1, 2004, São Luis, Maranhão - Brazil
  • SOAVE 2004 - SelfOrganization of AdaptiVE behavior, Ilmenau, 28.-30. September 2004

UP

Some of my academic activities in 2003:

• Co-organising the Second International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts. Co- organiser is Chrystopher Nehaniv. Calls for Extended Abstracts by 14th October 1998, submission Deadline 15th January 2003. The symposium runs from 7 - 11 April 2003 at University of Wales, Aberystwyth, United Kingdom, as part of the Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour Convention AISB'03 with the general theme of "Cognition in Machines and Animals"
• Program co-chair of the symposium Evolvability and Interaction: Evolutionary Substrates of Communication, Signaling, and Perception in the Dynamics of Social Complexity, 8-10 October 2003 London, England, U.K., as part of the EPSRC Network on Evolvability in Biological and Software Systems.
• Full day tutorial on Imitation and Social Learning in Animals and Artifacts (with Chrystopher Nehaniv) on 16th July 2003 at CIRA03, IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation (CIRA'03)
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • 7th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL-2003), 14. - 17. September 2003, Dortmund, Germany, submission deadline 1^st March 2003
  • 3^rd International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics, Boston, August 2003, USA
  • International Conference on Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment - TIDSE 2003, March 2003, Darmstadt, Germany, submission deadline 15^th November 2002
  • TIMR 03, the fourth British Conference on Mobile Robotics, 28-29 August, 2003, UWE Bristol, UK
  • IVA2003, 15-17 September 2003, Irsee, Germany
  • First German Conference on Multiagent System Technologies (MATES'03), September 22 - 25, 2003, Erfurt, Germany, submission deadline 28^th April 2003
  • Second International Workshop on Regulated Agent-Based Social Systems: Theories and Applications (RASTA'03), 2003 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, deadline 12th March 2003
  • 2003 IEEE/WIC International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT 2003), Sponsored by IEEE Computer Society and Web Intelligence Consortium (WIC), October 13-17, 2003, Tianlun Dynasty Hotel, BEIJING, CHINA
  • First International Workshop on Social Life (SOLI'03),14 September, 2003, held in conjunction with ECAL 2003, the 7th European Conference on Artificial Life
  • IROS-2003 Workshop on Robot Programming by Demonstration, Friday 31st of October 2003, 12-5pm, IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems: IROS 2003, Bally's Las Vegas Hotel, USA, October 27-31, 2003

UP

Some of my academic activities in 2002:

• Co-organiser (with Stephen Marsh, John Meech and Lucy Nowell) of the CHI2002 workshop The Philosophy and Design of Socially Adept Technologies. 21 April 2002, Minneapolis, USA.
• Editing a book "Socially Intelligent Agents - Creating relationships with computers and robots" (co-editors Alan Bond, Lola Canamero, Bruce Edmonds), Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Bruce Edmonds and I give a half-day tutorial on "Socially Intelligent Agents" at SAB 2002, special theme: Social Embeddedness - Origins, Occurrence and Opportunities, 10th August, 2002, Edinburgh.
• Organising committee of EPSRC/BBSRC International Workshop Biologically-Inspired Robotics: The Legacy of W.Grey Walter, 14-16 August 2002, Bristol, UK
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • The 7th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-7) March 25-27, 2002, Marina del Rey, California, USA.
  • First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents & Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS 2002, Palazzo Re Enzo, Bologna, Italy, July 15-19, 2002
  • 7th International Conference "Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, From Animals to Animats" (SAB 2002), Edinburgh (UK), August 4-10, 2002 .
  • The 4th International Conference on Disability, Virtual Reality and Associated Technologies (ICDVRAT2002) 18-20 September 2002, Veszprém, Hungary.
  • Second International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics - Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systemss to be held August 10-11, 2002 in Edinburgh, UK in conjunction with SAB'02: From Animals to Animats 7.
  • Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO-2002, July 9-13, 2002, New York City, NY USA.
  • GWAL-5, 5th German Workshop on Artificial Life, Lübeck, Germany, 18. - 20. March, 2002.
  • Animating expressive characters for social interactions, Symposium of the AISB'02 Convention, Imperial College, London, UK, 2nd - 5th April, 2002
  • ICALT 2002 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, September 9-12, 2002, Kazan, Russia, submission deadline 5th April 2002
  • NILE 2, Second International Workshop on Narrative and Interactive Learning Environments, 6th to 9th August 2002, Pollock Halls, The University of Edinburgh, deadline for paper submissions 31 May 2002
  • Fifth Workshop of the UK SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP ON MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS (UKMAS-2002), Foresight Centre, University of Liverpool, UK, 18-19 December 2002
  • ROMAN2002: 11th IEEE Int. Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Berlin, Germany from Sept 25-27, 2002

UP

Some of my academic activities in 2001

• Organising the Workshop on Robotic and Virtual Interactive Systems in Autism Therapy, 27-28 September 2001, at University of Hertfordshire.
• Invited speaker at the workshop "The future of learning", Chateau de Bagnols, France. Organisers: Luc Steels and Mario Tokoro (Sony).
• Invited speaker at the workshop "Social Robotics" Puerto Chico A, Lanzerote, Spain, June 29th to July 4th, 2001. Organisers: David McFarland and Owen Holland.
• Invited speaker at the workshop "Agent Culture: Designing Virtual Characters for a Multi-cultural World", 24-25 August 2001, Vienna. Organisers: Robert Trappl and Sabine Payr (Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence).
• Editing a Special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A: Systems and Humans on Socially Intelligent Agents - The Human in the Loop was 15th of December 2000. It has appeared in September 2001 as volume 31, number 5. List of contents. Guest Editor: Kerstin Dautenhahn.hmann and Daniel Polani) on Evolution of Sensors in Nature, Hardware and Simulation. Submission deadline 15th of September 2000. It has appeared as volume 7, number 2, 2001. List of contents.
• Editing a book (with Chrystopher Nehaniv) on "Imitation in Animals and Artifacts", MIT Press, to appear Spring 2002.
• Program Chair of CT2001, The Fourth International Conference on Cognitive Technology: INSTRUMENTS OF MIND (CT2001), to be held Monday 6th - Thursday 9th August, 2001 at University of Warwick, United Kingdom. The proceedings (Springer LNAI 2117) can be accessed here.
• Organizing Committee of First International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems, September 17-18, 2001, Lund, Sweden. Submission deadline 15th April 2001.
• Organizing committee of Emotional and Intelligent II: The tangled knot of social cognition, AAAI Fall Symposium, Sea Crest Conference Center, North Falmouth, MA, November 2-4, 2001, submission deadline March 30, 2001.
• Invited speaker and participant "Social Robotics", 3rd UWE ITERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON BIOLOGICAL ROBOTICS, Puerto Chico A, Playa Blanca, Lanzerote, Canaries, Spain, June 28th to July 5th, 2001
• Organizing committee of JSAI- Synsophy International Workshop on Social Intelligence Design, May 21-22, 2001 / Matsue, Shimane, Japan, submission deadline 31st January 2001.
• Organizing committee of Evolution of Sensors in Nature, Hardware, and Simulation (with Daniel Polani, Thomas Uthmann), workshop at GECCO2001, submission deadline 1st March 2001.
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • TIMR 2001, Third British conference on intelligent mobile robotics and autonomous systems, April 5th, 2001 at the University of Manchester.
  • IAT2001, Second Asian-Pacific Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology, 23-26 October 2001, Maebashi City, Japan, submission deadline 20th March 2001.
  • Member of Special Program Committee for Agents, Adaptive Behavior and Agents at GECCO 2001.
  • EWLR-2001, 9th European Workshop on Learning Robots, September 9th and 10th 2001, Prague, Czech Republic, Organized just before ECAL-2001, submission deadline 30th April 2001.
  • IVA2001: Third International Workshop on INTELLIGENT VIRTUAL AGENTS, September 11-12, 2001, Madrid, Spain, deadline for paper submissions 11th May 2001.
  • AEMAS'01: Adaptability and Embodiment using Multi-Agent Systems, Workshop at ACAI '2001, Prague, CZ., July 7th, 2001, submission deadline 15 April, 2001.
  • UKMAS 2001, Fourth Workshop of the UK Special Interest Group on Multi-Agent Systems St Catherine's College, Oxford University 13th-14th December, 2001, submission deadline 28th September 2001

UP

Some of my academic activities in 2000: 

• Chair of Socially Intelligent Agents - The Human in The Loop, AAAI Fall Symposium, 3-5 November, Sea Crest Resort, North Falmouth, MA, USA. Submission deadline 29th March 2000.
• Invited speaker at Strategies for Implementing Large Scale Emergent Systems, University of Wales, Cardiff. The Workshop is part of the Emergent Computing Network. Submission Deadline 15 March 2000.
• Invited speaker at Symposium "Artificial Mind ­ Artificial Soul" (organised by Prof. Dietrich Dörner, Bamberg) at XXVII International Congress of Psychology, Stockholm, 23-28 July, Sweden. Title of the talk "Making Friends with Robots: An Artificial Life Perspective on Socially Intelligent Agents".
• Invited speaker at conference "Perspectives on Adaptivity and Learning", 25-29 September, 2000 at Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld, Germany.
• Invited speaker at ifu's open space, International Women's University, 18 August 2000, Hannover, Germany, Theme: "intelligent beings - being intelligent". Title of my talk: "artificial life - "life like" artifacts and robotic friends".
• Giving a half-day tutorial "On Minds and Agents: Social Intelligence in Animals and Artifacts" at Autonomous Agents 2000, Fourth International Conference on AUTONOMOUS AGENTS (Agents 2000), Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, June 3 - June 7 2000. Deadline for electronic title page submission: 24th October 1999.
• Giving a two-hour tutorial Socially Intelligent Agents - From Animals to Animats within the Joint Tutorial Programme of SAB2000: 6th Int'l Conf. on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior and PPSN2000: 6th Int'l Conf. on Parallel Problem Solving From Nature, Paris, France, Sunday 17th September 2000
• Co-organiser (with Thomas Uthmann and Daniel Polani) of Evolution of Sensors in Nature, Hardware and Simulation, Bird-of-a-feather Workshop at GECCO 2000, submission deadline 1st March 2000.
• Co-editing (with Bruce Edmonds) a Special Issue of the Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation (JASSS) on Starting from Society - the application of social analogies to computational systems . Submission deadline is 1st of September 2000.
• Co-editing Imitation in Natural and Artificial Systems, special journal issue of Cybernetics and Systems. Co-editor: Chrystopher Nehaniv, Taylor & Francis
• Co-chair (with Bruce Edmonds) of AISB Symposium Starting from Society - the application of social analogies to computational systems, a symposium at, "Time for AI and Society" 2000 Convention of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour (AISB-00), 17th-20th April 2000, University of Birmingham, England, submission deadline is 6th January 2000.
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • FROM ANIMALS TO ANIMATS, The Sixth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB2000), 11 - 15 September 2000, Paris, France, deadline for paper submission: 19 Feb 2000.
  • GECCO-2000, Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2000), July 8 - 12, 2000, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, deadline for paper submissions: 26th January 2000.
  • 2000 Workshop on Interactive Robotics and Entertainment (WIRE-2000) in cooperation with AAAI, April 30 - May 1, 2000, The Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, submission deadline is 15th December 1999.
  • MABS2000 @ ICMAS-2000, The Second Workshop on Multi Agent Based Simulation, one day in period 7-9 July, 2000, Boston, MA, USA. Submission deadline 15 February 2000.
  • UKMAS-2000 Preliminary Call For Papers Third Workshop of the UK Special Interest Group on Multi-Agent Systems, St. Catherine's College, Oxford University, OX1 3UJ 14th - 15th December, 2000
  • Communicative Agents in Intelligent Virtual Environments , Workshop at the The Fourth International Conference on AUTONOMOUS AGENTS (Agents 2000), Barcelona, Spain from June 3-7, 2000.
  • For German speaking researchers: Second Workshop SOAVE 2000, Selbstorganisation von adaptivem Verhalten, 4-6 October 2000, Ilmenau, Germany, deadline for submissions: 2nd May 2000.

UP

Some of my academic activities in 1999:

• In June/July 1999 I worked as a Visiting Researcher at the MIT AI-LAB. In Boston I worked together with Cynthia Breazeal and Brian Scassellati on imitation with humanoid robots, associated to the exciting project KISMET. My stay was funded by an oversea travel grant by EPSRC.
• This year the book Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology will appear which I edited (published by John Benjamins Publishing Company). Please look at its Webpage for content and ordering information.
• Co-editing Imitation in Natural and Artificial Systems, special journal issue of Cybernetics and Systems. Co-editor: Chrystopher Nehaniv, Taylor & Francis
• The Special Issue "Imitation in Natural and Artificial Systems" has appeared, Cybernetics and Systems, volume 32, number 1-2. List of contents. Guest Editors: Chrystopher Nehaniv and Kerstin Dautenhahn, Taylor & Francis.
• Co-organising the AISB Symposium Imitation in Animals and Artifacts. Co- organiser is Chrystopher Nehaniv. Calls for Extended Abstracts by 14th October 1998, submission Deadline 21st December 1998.
• Member of the organizing committee of the AAAI Fall Symposium Narrative Intelligence. Co-chairs are Phoebe Sengers (phoebe@zkm.de) and Michael Mateas (michaelm@cs.cmu.edu). Other members of the organizing committee are Clark Elliott, James Lester, Chrystopher Nehaniv.
• Co-organising a workshop at GECCO-99 on Sensor Evolution in Nature, Hardware and Simulation, together with Daniel Polani and Thomas Uthmann. Deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st of March 1999.
• Franco di Primio and I are co- organising a workshop Embodied Mind / Artificial Life (German speaking meeting) at 4. Fachtagung der Gesellschaft für Kognitionswissenschaft, 28. September - 1. Oktober 1999 in Bielefeld (KogWis99). Deadline for statement papers/abstracts: 28/2/1999.
• Co-organising a workshop at Autonomous Agents (Agents '99) Seattle, Washington, USA. Title of Workshop The use of natural language in embodied systems. Co-organisers are: Jan-Torsten Milde (contact: milde@coli.uni-bielefeld.de), Michael Beetz.
• Guest Editor of Special Issue Artificial Life, journal KI. Deadline for submissions: 31st July, 1999.
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • Workshop on Intelligent Virtual Agents (Virtual Agents 99), One day workshop prior to and in Association with the UK VR SIG 99 Conference, 13th September 1999, The Centre for Virtual Environments, University of Salford, Salford, United Kingdom. Deadline for Extended Abstracts: 11th June 1999.
  • GECCO-99: July 14-17, 1999 Orlando, Florida USA, 1999 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
  • The Third International Cognitive Technology Conference, CT'99 (Aug. 11-14, 1999, San Francisco)
  • KI-99, 23. Deutsche Jahrestagung für Künstliche Intelligenz (German Annual Conference on Artificial Intelligence), 13.-15. September 1999 in Bonn, Germany
  • Towards Intelligent Mobile Robots TIMR UK 99, Conference on Applications of Mobile Robotics : Research to Real World Problems: Potential and Limitations. University of the West of England Bristol , 26 March 1999, submission deadline Friday, 5th February 1999.
  • EWLR 8: European Workshop on Learning Robots 1999, to be held at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland, on September 18th 1999
  • Attitude, Personality and Emotions in user-adapted interaction, a workshop at UM99, 7-th International Conference on User Modeling, Banff, Canada, June 20-24, 1999. Contact: Fiorella de Rosis (fide@mbox1.flashnet.it). Deadline for submissions: 15th of March 1999
  • BIML Biologically Inspired Machine Learning, a workshop during ACAI-99, 5-16 July 1999, Crete, Greece. Workshop Organisers: John Demiris (johnde@dai.ed.ac.uk), Gert Westermann (gert@cogsci.ed.ac.uk). Deadline for submissions: 1 March 1999.
  • UKMAS'99, The 2nd Workshop of the UK Special Interest Group on Multi-Agent Systems, Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol, UK, 6th - 7th December, 1999, Deadline for submission: 1st September, 1999.

UP

Some of my academic activities in 1998:

• Guest editing a special issue of Industrial Robot, an International Journal. Title of the special issue is "Robot languages/Robot networking".
• Guest editing Social Intelligence, a special issue of Computational and Mathematical Organization Theory, Submission deadline: 2nd November 1998, co-editor: Bruce Edmonds
• Guest editing a Special Issue of of Applied Artificial Intelligence, an International Journal on "Socially Intelligent Agents", co-editor: Chisato Numaoka. The issue publishes a small selection of contributions to the AAAI Fall Symposium in 1997 with the same title.
• Guest editing a Special Issue of the international journal Adaptive Behavior. Title of the special issue is: Simulation Models of Social Agents. Submission deadline: 30th of April 1998.
• Guest editing a book within the series "Advances in Consciousness Research", John Benjamins Publishing Company, editors of the series: Maxim Stamenov and Gordon Globus. Booktitle: "Human Cognition and Social Agent Technology".
• Bruce Edmonds and I organised the workshop Socially Situated Intelligence . Submission deadline 14th of June 1998. It is a full-day workshop associated to: SAB'98: the Fifth International Conference of the Society for Adaptive Behavior, University of Zürich, 17 - 21 August 1998, Switzerland, SAB'98. See the Workshop Webpage for the on-line versions of the working notes contributions.
• Takashi Kido, Stephen W. Smoliar, Patricia O'Neill-Brown and I are co-organising a half-day workshop Issues in Cross Cultural Communication: Towards Culturally Situated Agents. November 22, 1998 in Singapore. The workshop is associated with the 5th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI'98) Singapore, November 22-27, 1998. Contact address: Takashi Kido: kido@nttmsc.com.my. Deadline for paper/abstract submission: 20 August 1998
• Organising together with Gillian Hayes (University of Edinburgh, Department of AI) the workshop Agents in interaction - acquiring competences through imitation . Submission deadline 15th of January 1998. It is a full-day workshop on May 9, 1998, associated to: Second International Conference on AUTONOMOUS AGENTS (Agents '98), Minneapolis/St. Paul, May 10-13, 1998. See the Workshop Program..
• I am in the programme committee of:
  • The 3rd German Workshop on Artificial Life 1998, GWAL'98, 17. /18. September 1998, Germany.
  • Computation for Metaphors, Analogy and Agents, an International Workshop 6-10 April 1998 - University of Aizu, Japan. Contact: Chrystopher Nehaniv (Chair), nehaniv@u-aizu.ac.jp.
  • AAAI 1998 Fall Symposium, Emotional and Intelligent: The Tangled Knot of Cognition, to be held at the Omni Rosen Hotel in Orlando, Florida, October 23-25, 1998). Contact: Dolores Cañamero (Chair), lola@arti.vub.ac.be
  • Human Learning meets Machine Learning , one-day workshop to be held in conjunction with the 10th European Conference on Machine Learning (ECML'98), Chemnitz, Germany, April 24, 1998, organisers: Dolores Cañamero (lola@iiia.csic.es), Maarten Van Someren (maarten@swi.psy.uva.nl).
  • Intelligent Virtual Environments, Workshop at ECAL98, Brighton Centre, Brighton, UK on 23-28 August 1998, contact: Ruth Aylett (r.s.aylett@iti.salford.ac.uk).
  • European Workshop on Learning Robots 1998 (EWLR-7), Edinburgh, 20 July 1998, contact address: John Demiris (johnde@dai.ed.ac.uk, chair), Andreas Birk (co-chair)
  • Workshop of UK Special Interest Group on Multi-Agent Systems (formerly `FoMAS'), Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, U.K., 14th-15th December, 1998. Contact: email M.Fisher@doc.mmu.ac.uk

UP

Some of my academic activities in 1997:

• I visited ETL (Electrotechnical Laboratory) in Tsukuba/Japan, 22-July to 1st of September 1997, Humanoid Interaction Laboratory, invited by Luc Berthouze. I worked on a project on robot-human interaction.
• Socially intelligent agents: Within the AAAI Fall Symposium Series a Symposium Socially Intelligent Agents, held in the Tang Center at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 8-10, 1997. The ideas was to bring together software and hardware (robot) agent researchers for discussing common topics in the domain of social expertise. My motivation to initiate such a symposium was the hypothesis that a social interface can be specified which applies to agents which are communicating and interacting with humans, independent on the technological realization.

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Activities from 1993-96: Imitation and the Huegellandschaft scenario

• During my stay at GMD in Germany I started ecological experiments on robot group behaviour in a hilly landscape, the so-called "Huegellandschaft". From March- December 1996, during my stay at the VUB-AI Lab in Brussels, I had a HCM/TMR research grant for a project on robot group behavior and the imitation of movements. The project's main objective is investigating the development of artificial social intelligence in groups of autonomous robots. While the theoretical background is rooted in the biological and social sciences the project covers as well the engineering domain, namely it aims at constructing robots in order to experimentally test theoretical considerations. Deeply inspired by results from natural sciences "imitation" will be studied as a basis for developing individual "social relationships" and learning movement patterns. The project aims at (1) the construction and control of imitating robots, and (2) the investigation of social group behavior in "individualized robot societies".
  Project Description.
  

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Teaching:

• Winter term 1996/97: Artificial Life lectures at University of Bielefeld (Germany)
• Summer Term 1997, Autumn and Lent Term 1998/99, 1999/2000: "Artificial Life"
• Autumn Term 1997, Autumn and Lent Term 1998/99, 1999/2000: "Animal Systems"
• Lent Term 1999, 2000: "Mobile Robotics"
• 2001-2012: MSc course Artificial Life (part of our School's modular MSc scheme)
• 2001/2002/2003: lecturing in final year Computer Science Course on AI Theory and Applications
• 2001/2002: lecturing in final year courses on Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence

UP

PhD projects I am involved in (as Principal Supervisor if not stated otherwise):

• Kyron du Casse (University of Hertfordshire): Migration architectures for robot companions, as part of the project Lirec
• Michael Bowler (University of Hertfordshire, Research Assistant, Dr. Farshid Amirabdollahian is Principal Supervisor): Enhancing rehabilitation robotics through haptics and social mediation, as part of the project Lirec
• Dag Syrdal (University of Hertfordshire, Research Assistant): Mental models in human-robot interaction, as part of the project Lirec
• Luke Wood (University of Hertfordshire): Aurora project
• Konstantinos Theofilis (University of Hertfordshire, Prof. C. L. Nehaniv is Principal Supervisor): Imitation and social learning
• Radhika Chemuturi (University of Hertfordshire, Dr. Farshid Amirabdollahian is Principal Supervisor): Robotic neuro-rehabilitation
• Ori Novanda (University of Hertfordshire): Human-humanoid interaction and imitation games
• Ismael Duque Garcia (University of Hertfordshire): Behaviour models for domestic robots
• Nathan Burke (University of Hertfordshire): Human-humanoid co-learning

Finished PhD projects:

• Aude Billard (University of Edinburgh, Department of Artificial Intelligence): Experiments on Grounding Communication Through Imitation in Autonomous Robots. Aude is now Professor at EPFL and director of the Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory at EPFL in Switzerland
• Aris Alissandrakis (September 2003, University of Hertfordshire): Imitation and Solving the Correspondence Problem for Dissimilar Embodiments - A Generic Framework. Prof. Chrystopher L. Nehaniv was his Principal Supervisor. As a postdoc Aris continued his research on robot imitation in the Adaptive Systems Research Group as Research Fellow in Robot Learning, within the European project Cogniron. Since November 2008 he works at the Miyake Lab, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan, working with Associate Professor Yoshihiro MIYAKE after receiving a FY2007 Postdoctoral Fellowship for Foreign Researchers from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS) to conduct research in Japan for a period of two years.
• Iain Werry (Reading): Development and Evaluation of a Mobile Robotic Platform as a Therapy Device for Children with Autism, part of the Aurora Project. Iain is now Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at University of Hertfordshire.
• Ben Robins (July 2005, University of Hertfordshire): A humanoid robot as assistive technology for encouraging social interaction skills in children with autism, part of the Aurora Project, and more recently, the IROMEC project. Ben is now Research Fellow in the Adaptive Systems Research Group at University of Hertfordshire.
• Wan Ching Ho - Steve (October 2005, University of Hertfordshire): Computational memory architectures for autobiographic and narrative virtual agents. Steve works as a Research Fellow within the European project e-Circus from March 2006.
• Joe Saunders (December 2006, University of Hertfordshire): Observational Imitation, Self-Imitation and Environmental Scaffolding in Robotic Systems. Prof. Chrystopher L. Nehaniv was his Principal Supervisor. Joe works as a Research Fellow within the European project ITalk.
• Michael L. Walters (February 2008, University of Hertfordshire): The design space for robot appearance and behaviour for social robot companions. Mick is continuing his work as part of the FP6 project Cogniron and (from 1 March 2008 onwards), the FP7 project LIREC.
• Assif Mirza (November 2008, University of Hertfordshire): Grounded Sensorimotor Interaction Histories for Ontogenetic Development in Robots. Prof. Chrystopher L. Nehaniv was his Principal Supervisor. Assif is now Research Fellow at IIT in Italy, continuing his work in the Robotcub project.
• Dorothee Francois (December 2008, University of Hertfordshire): Facilitating play between children with autism and an autonomous robot. This work has contributed to the projects RobotCub and Aurora. Principal Supervisor was Dr. Daniel Polani.
• Megan Davis (January 2009, University of Hertfordshire): Touchstroy: Interactive Software Designed to Assist Children with Autism to Understand Narrative. This work has contributed to the Aurora Project.
• Fotios Papadopoulos (November 2012, University of Hertfordshire): Socially Interactive Robots as Mediators in Human-Human Remote Communication. Co-supervisor was Dr. Wan Ching Ho. The thesis contributed to the LIREC project.
• Joshua Wainer (January 2013, University of Hertfordshire): Facilitating collaboration among children with autism through robot-assisted play. Co-supervisors were Dr. Ben Robins and Dr. Farshid Amirabdollahian.
• Qiming Shen (January 2013, University of Hertfordshire); Motor interference and behaviour adaptation in human-humanoid interactions. Co-supervisors were Dr. Joe Saunders and Dr. Hatice Kose.

Completed MPhil projects that I supervised: