I am a professor of Human-Robot Interaction at the School of Engineering and Computer Science, the University of Hertfordshire. I am currently director of the Robotics Research Group but also I direct Robot House and Kaspar projects.

I am the University Theme Champion in Information and Security. I coordinated and completed the Accompany and SCRIPT projects funded by the framework 7 programme of the European Community.

My research is focused on human-robot interaction and is applied in the context of rehabilitation, assistive technology and more recently, over the past 7 years, takes an interest on deep learning and machine learning approaches for HRI.

 Read more...

Dr Diego R. Faria is a Reader in Robotics and Intelligent Adaptive Systems at the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science of University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK. He is the head of the CoPERAS Lab (Cognitive, Perception and Emotion for Robotics and Autonomous Systems). From Jul/2016 to Mar/2022 he was a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at Aston University, Birmingham, UK. Dr Diego R. Faria has coordinated multiples scientific projects in partnership with several European Universities and EU / British Companies, summing up over £3M, funded by the European Commission, UK national funding agencies (EPSRC, Royal Society, Newton Fund and Innovate-UK), the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technolgy, IEEE RAS-SIGHT and the Brazilian agency CONFAP / Araucaria Foundation. The projects are related to Assistive Technology, Cognitive Robotics, Brain-Computer Interfaces, Artificial Perception, AI and Machine Learning applied to multiple contexts, including social and affective robotics, autonomous vehicles and adaptive intelligent systems. From 2014 to 2016, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Systems and Robotics, Portugal, where he collaborated on several projects funded by the European Commission and the Portuguese government in the areas of Robotics, AI, and Assistive Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (Cognitive Robotics) from the University of Coimbra, Portugal, in 2014. He holds a MSc. degree in Computer Science from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), Brazil in 2005. In 2001 he obtained a B.Tech. degree in Informatics Technology (data computing), and a specialization (PGDip) in Computer Science, State University of Londrina (UEL) in 2002. He is reviewer of the most important Robotics conferences world-wide and the highest impact journals in the field of Robotics, Pattern Recognition, Brain-Computer Interfaces, and Applied Machine Learning. He has published several scientific papers in high impact journals and international conferences available at http://shorturl.at/dlos6

 Read more...

Dr Catherine Menon is a principal lecturer within the robotics research group. Her research focuses on the intersection between safety and ethics in autonomous systems. She was PI on the AAIP funded feasibility project Assuring safety and social credibility and is a member of the BSI AMT/10 and AMT/10/1 Committees, providing UK input into ISO/TC 299 (standardisation in robotics) and BS 8611 (ethical design and application of robotic devices).

 Read more...

As the manager of Robot House, Patrick coordinates all research activities inside the house, supports internal and external collaborators in using the facilities, and advises them while conducting research. At the same time, he maintains the robots and all the other interactive technology in the house. Patrick has extensive expertise in social human-robot interaction and experimentation and is highly skilled with a large array of robotic and sensing technologies.

He is also a supervisor of several PhD students and a Visiting Lecturer at the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science, teaching advanced research topics in computer science and other modules.

Patrick is currently a CoI of the UKRI TAS hub's pump priming project Kaspar explains and an advisory board member of the Norwegian project Human Interactive Robotics in Healthcare (HIRo). He was also a CoI of the AAIP funded feasibility project Assuring safety and social credibility. Previously, he been a postdoctoral researcher in the Robot House 2.0 project, an EPSRC strategic equipment grant, and in the Cognitive Service Robotics Apartment, a large-scale project within the DFG-funded excellence cluster CITEC where he was a member of the Cognitive Systems Engineering group.

 Read more...

Gabriella is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Hertfordshire. She completed her PhD in the field of Ethology analyzing Human-Dog Interactions, after which she transferred her skills to the field of human-robot interactions. Gabriella has extensive experience in the fields of human-robot interactions and robot-assisted therapy for children with autism. She participated in several large-scale European projects such as LIREC and BabyRobot, as well as in the EPSRC funded project Trustworthy Robotic Assistants. More recently, she has also been involved as a CoI of the UKRI TAS hub's pump priming round one project Kaspar explains, the EPSRC Network+ project EMERGENCE, the EU ERASMUS+ EMBOA project, and the Kaspar for Speech and Language Therapy project funded by the Baily Thomas Charitable Fund.

Dr Hooman Samani is a Senior Lecturer in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire, focusing on AI-Driven Social-Service Robotics. He is the Fellow of Higher Education Academy (FHEA).

He has worked as a Lecturer in Machine Learning, AI for Robotics at the University of Plymouth, United Kingdom; Associate Professor and the founder and director of the AIART Lab (Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Technology Laboratory) at National Taipei University of Taiwan; Research Fellow at the Keio-NUS CUTE Centre, a joint research centre between National University of Singapore and Keio University of Japan; Engineer at Posco, South Korea and Robotics Researcher at Philips, The Netherlands and Fraunhofer, Germany. He holds a PhD degree in Robotics from the National University of Singapore.

He is actively serving several robotics and AI related journals and conferences as editorial board member, organising committee member, workshop organiser and reviewer. Apart from academia, he has work experience in Philips and Posco as well as R&D projects in different industrial sectors that have rounded-out his experiences. He was featured in many international media such as Discovery Channel, New Scientist and Reuters, starring his research in robotics. In tandem with his research in robotics, he has participated and won several international RoboCup competitions.

He is a proponent of "the best way to predict the future is to create it". He enjoys the serendipity of traveling around the world without (much) planning as a real life implementation of SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) and Reinforcement Learning (Taking actions in an environment to maximize the notion of cumulative reward). In his spare time, he plays guitar when he is in the mood and tennis when he is not.

 Read more...

Dr Abolfazl Zaraki is Senior Lecturer in Robotics at the Computer Science department of the University of Hertfordshire. Before joining UH, he was a lecturer at the School of Engineering and a member of the Research Centre in AI, Robotics and Human-Machine Systems (IROHMS) at Cardiff University, Cardiff. He was the Co-chair of the Human-Like Artificial Intelligence (AI) working group and a member of the IROHMS leadership team.

He received a master's degree in mechatronics and automatic control engineering from University Technology Malaysia, Malaysia, in 2010, and a PhD degree in automatic robotic and bioengineering from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2014. Between 2014 and 2019, he worked as Research Fellow/Senior Research Fellow at different research institutions in Italy and the UK.

In the past, Abolfazl worked on European projects EASEL (Expressive Agents for Symbiotic Education and Learning), BabyRobot - NextGen Social Robotics, JAMES (Joint Action for Multimodal Embodied Social Systems) and an Innovate UK funded project Piglet - Snake Robot Solution for Inspection in collaboration with industry.

Abolfazl's research interests include developing autonomous systems for social and industrial robotic platforms, trusted autonomy, closed-loop Human-Robot Interaction studies, and brain-computer interface (BCI) for research and assistive applications.

 Read more...

Sílvia is a Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire. She received an Industrial Engineering degree at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), a PAIR Master degree in Automated Production and Robotics at the Fundació CIM - UPC and a Robotics and Automation Master degree at the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid. She also received a Psychology degree at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). She was previously part of the now finished EU Horizon2020 BabyRobot project. Her research interests include social robotics, Human-Robot Interaction and design of robotic behaviours for children with autism.

 Read more...

Ali is a PhD student at the School of Physics, Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Hertfordshire. His research focuses on human-robot interaction, with the objective of trust between robots and humans.

Avoiding over-trust and lack of trust are noteworthy challenges in HRI. There are various aspects which should be considered to balance the level of trust, and that is what makes this field significantly special and impressive.

 Read more...