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.
Personalisation through incremental and online learning of users' appearances, their behaviours and preferences in customer-oriented service and socially assistive robotics domains.
Personalised motion and placement planning was designed for loading a dishwasher using a custom robot arm within simulation and real-world contexts.
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).
Design and assembly of the chassis and mechanical parts of autonomous educational mobile robots.
From emotionally adaptive virtual agent, personalised narrator robot and tracked robots to organising workshops, I like being involved in various projects.
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 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
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.
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.
OCTOBER 2021
Open-sourced PhD projects for face recognition with Pepper and NAO robots and for NAO robot to detect objects and determine their positions, and point and look at them.
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 100 virtual 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.
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.