Bahar Irfan

PhD Thesis
PhD Thesis
Postdoctoral Research
PlayPlay
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
PlayPlay
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
PlayPlay
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
for long-lasting interactions that meet your expectations

Ever since I was young, I dreamed of building personal robots that can help us in our daily lives. Here I am, a roboticist (PhD), computer engineer (MSc), and mechanical engineer (BSc). And this is my story with robots…

NEWS

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 50 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.

APRIL 2022

Invited speaker at the ANIMATAS Careers after PhD seminar on Research in Industry.

MARCH 2022

Coordinated and co-organised the second edition of the "Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction (LEAP-HRI)" workshop with fantastic speakers and panellists at the International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2022). Recording available here.

OCTOBER 2021

Journal paper on "Multi-modal Open World User Identification" is published at the Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction. Open world user recognition algorithm, Multi-modal Incremental Bayesian Network, and Multi-modal Long-Term User Recognition Dataset are available online.

SEPTEMBER 2021

Journal paper on "Coffee With a Hint of Data: Towards Using Data-Driven Approaches in Personalised Long-Term Interactions" is published at the Frontiers in Robotics and AI. Barista Datasets and the code for data-driven dialogue architectures are available online.

MARCH 2021

Journal paper on "A Socially Assistive Robot for Long-Term Cardiac Rehabilitation in the Real World" is published at the Frontiers in Neurorobotics.

MARCH 2021

Coordinated and co-organised the workshop on "Lifelong Learning and Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction (LEAP-HRI)" with 101 attendees at the International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2021)! Also, I moderated the panel discussions. Recording of the workshop is available here and proceedings are online.

FEBRUARY 2021

Invited tech talk at the HEART (Humanizing tEchnology And Robots Talks) webinar at SoftBank Robotics Europe on Personalisation in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction: Challenges and Suggestions. Video recording is available here.

DECEMBER 2020

Delighted to be awarded my PhD degree by the University of Plymouth!

DECEMBER 2020

My work with Dr. James Kennedy at Disney Research got featured by Blooloop!

OCTOBER 2020

Presented Disney Research internship work on "Dynamic Emotional Language Adaptation in Multiparty Interactions with Agents" at the ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA).

September 2020

Successfully defended my PhD thesis "Multi-modal Personalisation in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction", and passed my viva without corrections!

August 2020

Presented our work on "Using a Personalised Socially Assistive Robot for Cardiac Rehabilitation: A Long-Term Case Study" at the International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).

May 2020

Won the second prize at the Three Minute Thesis presentation at the University of Plymouth!

March 2020

Presented "Challenges of a Real-World HRI Study with Non-Native English Speakers: Can Personalisation Save the Day?" Late-Breaking Report on the barista robot study with my previous intern Mehdi Hellou at HRI 2020 virtual conference.

FEBRUARY 2020

Joined Evinoks Service Equipment Industry and Commerce Inc. (Turkey) as a Research and Development Associate, focusing on customized software for industrial robots, virtual reality, and smart buffets.

December 2019

Happy to be a Student Volunteer Chair as part of the Organizing Committee for HRI 2020. If you would like to be involved, you can apply to be a student volunteer here.

August 2019

Presented my work on "Multi-modal Personalisation in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction" and joint work with Mina Marmpena on personalised robot narrator with non-verbal emotional communication at ICDL-Epirob 2019 workshop on Personal Robotics and Secure Human-Robot Collaboration.

July 2019

Started an internship as a Lab Associate for 4-months at Disney Research in Walt Disney Imagineering Research & Development, Inc, under the supervision of Dr. James Kennedy.

April 2019

Invited speaker at the Behaviors.AI workshop to present my work on "Multi-modal Personalisation in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction" in Lyon, France.

March 2019

Coordinated and co-organised "Personalization in Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction (PLOT-HRI)" workshop at the International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2019). Proceedings are available online.

February 2019

Happy to welcome Mehdi Hellou to SoftBank Robotics Europe as an intern for the 6-months personalization in long-term HRI project. I will be co-supervising him along with Alexandre Mazel.