What are the key challenges of integrating LLMs into conversational robots for real-world interaction? How can we detect and measure user enjoyment in conversations with LLM-based dialogue systems? What do older adults expect from companion robots in terms of conversational behavior and support? How can foundation models be adapted to meet these user expectations in companion-robot applications?
ABOUT ME
Creating personal robots
with lifelong learning
for long-lasting interactions
that meet your expectations
Ever since I was young, I dreamed of building personal robots that can learn and adapt to help us in our daily lives. Here I am, a roboticist (PhD), computer engineer (MSc), mechanical engineer (BSc), and Senior Research Scientist at Familiar Machines & Magic. And this is my story with robots…
NEWS
JANUARY 2025
Coordinating the sixth edition of the Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction (LEAP-HRI) at HRI! If you are working on this area, submit a paper!
OCTOBER 2025
Gave a talk at the 9th Furhat Conference on Social Robotics on "When to Speak and When to Listen: Turn-Taking for Conversational HRI". You can watch the talk here. This talk was based on our best paper at HRI.
OCTOBER 2025
I have joined Familiar Machines & Magic as a Senior Research Scientist! We are building artificial life that blends personality, memory, and motion, so machines can relate, remember, and support their users.
SEPTEMBER 2025
Incredibly proud of Ricardo Santana, the first-year PhD student I co-supervised with André Pereira, for winning the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2025), with his first-ever paper. We introduce a lightweight multimodal framework that predicts users' self-reported enjoyment with robots using self-supervised audio and text embeddings, without emotion labels or LLM prompting. You can read the paper here.
SEPTEMBER 2025
Gabriel Skantze and I were featured in an episode of Sverige forskar (Sweden Researches) on UR, Swedish Educational Broadcasting company, where we talk about our research on turn-taking in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). You can watch the episode here. This episode was based on our best paper at HRI.
JUNE 2025
I finished my postdoc at KTH Royal Institute of Technology as a Digital Futures fellow, supervised by the fantastic Gabriel Skantze and Sanna Kuoppamäki.
APRIL 2025
Gave a talk at the 8th Furhat Conference on Social Robotics on "Designing Conversational Robots with Large Language Models: From Challenges to Best Practices". You can watch the talk here. This talk was based on our best paper in Frontiers in Robotics & AI and challenges paper in Autonomous Robots.
MARCH 2025
Extremely happy to receive the Best Paper Award from Frontiers in Robotics and AI journal! It was selected as one of the 11 best papers out of 261 published in robotics last year. The paper explores what older adults expect from conversational companion robots and provides actionable recommendations on how foundation models can help meet those expectations. Check the paper here. Watch my talk on the paper. Editor's Picks 2024 e-Book featuring our paper with the other best papers is here.
MARCH 2025
Thrilled to receive the Best Paper Award in the Systems track at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2025) with Gabriel Skantze for our work on turn-taking in conversational HRI! Check the paper here.
MARCH 2025
Ruben Janssens, a PhD student at Ghent University that I co-supervise with Tony Belpaeme, André Pereira, and Gabriel Skantze, presented our work on using LLMs for user enjoyment prediction in conversations to enable adaptive interactions, based on our HRI Conversational User Enjoyment Scale at HRI 2025! Check the paper here.
MARCH 2025
Gave a keynote on "Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction in the Real World: Aligning Robots to Expectations" at the Human-Robot Interaction in Extreme and Challenging Environments (Exacting) workshop at HRI 2025, discussing practical lessons learned from the 2.5-year deployment of robots in a hospital, with recommendations for integrating foundation models to create long-term companions. Watch the talk here.
MARCH 2025
Coordinated the fifth edition of the "Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction (LEAP-HRI)" workshop with fantastic speakers and debaters at HRI 2025. Over 40 participants joined us in person and online, making it the most popular workshop at HRI for the fifth year in a row. You can watch the recording here.
MARCH 2025
Happy to be part of the Organization Committee as the Publicity and Web Co-Chair for the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2026) in Edinburgh!
