News

We are proud to announce that our research paper, "What Makes an Educational Robot Game Fun? Framework Analysis of Children’s Design Ideas," received the Best Presentation Award at the 16th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2024), held from October 23-26 in Odense, Denmark. The paper was also nominated for the best paper award. This year’s conference theme, "Empowering Humanity: The Role of Social and Collaborative Robotics in Shaping Our Future," highlighted innovative advancements in social robotics aimed at enhancing human interaction and societal integration.

Marking the 7th year since Prof. Dautenhahn joined Canada 150 Research Chairs, her work is highlighted in an interview.

Mirrly is a new humanoid robot designed to facilitate human-robot social interactions, focusing on applications in therapy and education for children. Inspired by the need for engaging and effective interactions, Mirrly’s design incorporates a friendly appearance, articulated expressive face, and multimodal interaction capabilities.

We were thrilled to host a special lab tour for visitors from the KidsAbility Centre for Child Development. The event provided an excellent opportunity to present our research and showcase the unique capabilities of our socially interactive robots. Through this engaging experience, visitors gained a deeper understanding of the potential for robotics to positively impact the lives of children, particularly in therapeutic and educational settings.

An interdisciplinary research team from the University of Waterloo's Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab (SIRRL) has found that people prefer interacting with robots they perceive to have social identities like their own.

This finding was made by a pair of Waterloo professors: Dr. Moojan Ghafurian, based in the Department of Systems Design Engineering and Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn, from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who worked together to conduct new research on human interactions with social robots. These robots possess social abilities and can interact with humans in interpersonal and social manners.

Kerstin Dautenhahn was a speaker at the AI for Social Good Stream, part of Industry Day: Co-hosted by Waterloo AI & Advanced Manufacturing Consortium (AMC). Her talk was entitled “Towards Adaptive Social Robots: Integrating Physiological Adaptation in Human-Robot Interactions” and gave a brief introduction into social robotics followed by an overview of the HRI Physio Lib project at SIRRL.

A new study by Moojan Ghafurian, Collin Ellard, and Kerstin Dautenhahn shows people are more open to the use of social robots after living through the coronavirus pandemic.

Read more on University of Waterloo News and London Evening Standard.

This event is a celebration of the Engineering Excellence Fellowship and Advanced Manufacturing Fellowship recipients who began their programs in the last 5 terms. Hamza Mahdi (MASc student in SIRRL and award recipient) and Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn (his research supervisor) were invited to join in the celebration.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) interviewed Professor Kerstin Dautenhahn in their series on responsible AI on Tuesday, October 8, 2019. 

This series is part of their Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law (SRHRL) program. This event that was broadcasted (live) on AAAS facebook page was focused on intelligent toys and AI technologies aimed at children. 

Canadian roadcasting Corporation (CBC) radio interviewed professor Kerstin Dautenhahn on Monday Oct 7th, 2019. 

This interview was discussing whether robots would make better political leaders than humans, which was based on an article published in World Economic Forum that was written by one of the guests in the show.