News

The Government of Canada has announced significant funding awards for University of Waterloo researchers, with Faculty of Engineering scholars receiving grants for impactful projects in technology, sustainability, and health. This funding, awarded through the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), aims to advance critical areas of research and infrastructure. Charmaine Dean, vice-president of Research and International at Waterloo, congratulated these researchers, noting the importance of this support in fostering innovation across vital research domains.

CTV Kitchener has featured new research on people's preferences towards robots that are similar to themselves led by professors Moojan Ghafurian and Kersten Dautenhahn. They asked 95 people to rate pictures of 11 different robots on some key characteristics like how good, active, and powerful they appeared.

A Waterloo Engineering research team has released new work that shows humans prefer interacting with social robots they perceive to have personalities that match their own.  

This finding was made by Dr. Moojan Ghafurian, a systems design engineering professor, and Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn, a professor of electrical and computer engineering.  

The research included 95 participants between the ages of 20 and 67 who were asked to evaluate social robots based on the Affect Control Theory (ACT), which emphasizes qualities like goodness, activity, and power to determine the social identities that humans most like to interact with.