Bahar Irfan

PhD Thesis
PhD Thesis
Postdoctoral Research
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Personalized Companion Robot for Open Domain Dialogue in Long-Term Elderly Care

In order to have robots at the houses of elderly people or senior care centers in the future, we need personal robots that can converse in the native language of the person and continuously learn from these conversations to provide personalized assistance and support over long-term interactions.

PhD Thesis
PlayPlay
Multi-Modal Personalisation in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction

Personalisation through incremental and online learning of users' appearances, their behaviours and preferences in customer-oriented service and socially assistive robotics domains.

Master Thesis
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Manipulation and Placement Planning for Loading a Dishwasher by a Robot

Personalised motion and placement planning was designed for loading a dishwasher using a custom robot arm within simulation and real-world contexts.

RoboCup
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Motion and Behaviour Planning in Cerberus Team

Designing motions for getting up on falls, various kicks and goalie motions (2014), and behaviour planning for technical challenges, such as whistle detection and realistic environments (2015).

Senior Year Project
PlayPlay
Mechanical Design and Modeling of Minik-II Robots

Design and assembly of the chassis and mechanical parts of autonomous educational mobile robots.

Other Projects
PlayPlay

From emotionally adaptive virtual agent, personalised narrator robot and tracked robots to organising workshops, I like being involved in various projects.

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Postdoctoral Research
PhD Thesis
Master Thesis
RoboCup
Senior Year Project
Other Projects
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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 a Postdoc and Digital Futures fellow at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. And this is my story with robots…

NEWS

FEBRUARY 2024

Thrilled to receive the SIGCHI Gary Marsden travel award for coordinating the 4th workshop on Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction (LEAP-HRI) at the International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) in Boulder, CO.

SEPTEMBER 2023

Happy to be part of the Program Committee of the International Symposium on Technological Advances in Human-Robot Interaction.​

SEPTEMBER 2023

Gave a keynote on integrating large language models to conversational robots for older adults at International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) at the Geriatronics: AI and Robotics for Health & Well-Being in Older Age workshop with 50+ attendees! Check the pre-print here.

JULY 2023

Happy to be invited to the Program Committee of the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) for the research on Longitudinal and Case Studies.

JUNE 2023

Moderated the 5th Furhat Conference on Social Robotics on "How Large Language Models are Redefining Social Robotics". Over 200 participants joined online for 2 hours to hear from 4 excellent speakers on the opportunities and risks of generative AI.

APRIL 2023

Presented my postdoctoral work on Personalized Companion Robot for Open-Domain Dialogue in Long-Term Elderly Care at Digital Futures Open Research Days.

APRIL 2023

Presented my current and previous work on "Personal Robots in the Wild" as a Deep Dive Talk at KTH Digital Futures.

MARCH 2023

Coordinated and co-organised the third edition of the "Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction (LEAP-HRI)" workshop with fantastic speakers and debaters at the International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2023). Over 80 participants joined us in person and online, making it the most popular workshop at HRI for the third year in a row. If you missed it, you can watch the recording and delve deeper into the explored topics in the proceedings.

MARCH 2023

Co-organised "Human-Robot Conversational Interaction" workshop at the International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2023). With over 40 attendees, an insightful keynote and 12 great presentations from early-stage researchers, the workshop was a huge success! You can read more about the presented work here.

NOVEMBER 2022

Presented my prior and current work as an invited speaker at the Workshop on Robotic Failures in Health and Social Care and Swedish Dialogue Workshop.

OCTOBER 2022

Presented my postdoctoral research on "Personalized Companion Robot for Open Domain Dialogue in Long-Term Elderly Care" at the Digitalize in Stockholm conference. Video of the presentation is available here.

september 2022

Co-organised a special session on "Short- and Long-Term Personalisation in Human-Robot Interaction" and the 6th Workshop on Behavior Adaptation and Learning for Assistive Robotics at the 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2022).

JUNE 2022

Joined KTH Royal Institute of Technology as a Postdoctoral Researcher with a Digital Futures fellowship! I will be working with Gabriel Skantze and Sanna Kuoppamäki on creating a personal companion robot with lifelong learning for open-domain dialogue in long-term elderly care.