About Me
Bahar İrfan: Spring Wisdom

My research focuses on creating personal robots that can continually learn and adapt to help everyone in their daily lives. I’m currently a Postdoctoral Researcher and Digital Futures Fellow at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), where I work on large language models to build conversational companion robots for older adults, with Prof. Gabriel Skantze (Chief Scientist and co-founder of Furhat Robotics) and Dr. Sanna Kuoppamäki.
Before that, I was a Research and Development Associate at Evinoks Service Equipment Industry and Commerce Inc. (Turkey), where I contributed to software solutions for industrial robots, smart buffets, and virtual reality systems. In 2019, I also worked at Disney Research Los Angeles as a Research and Development Lab Associate, focusing on reinforcement learning for emotional language adaptation in dynamic, multi-party interactions.

I earned my PhD as an Early-Stage Researcher through the EU H2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network project APRIL (Applications of Personal Robotics for Interaction and Learning) from University of Plymouth (UK) and SoftBank Robotics Europe (France). My PhD research focused on multi-modal personalisation in long-term human-robot interaction, particularly in rehabilitation and service robotics, under the supervision of Prof. Tony Belpaeme, Dr. Michael Garcia Ortiz, and Dr. Natalia Lyubova.
I hold an MSc in computer engineering, with a specialisation in robotics and AI, from Boğaziçi University (Turkey), where I also served as a research and teaching assistant for 2 years. My Master’s thesis focused on user-centred task planning and manipulation for a dishwasher-loading robot, under the supervision of Prof. H. Levent Akın and Prof. Albert Ali Salah.
I was also part of the Cerberus RoboCup team (2013–2015), where I designed motions and behaviours for robot football. I completed my BSc in mechanical engineering, graduating 3rd in my class from Boğaziçi University, with a focus on mechatronics. I also spent a semester as an exchange student at Purdue University (USA). For my senior project, I designed and built mobile educational robots that have since been used for over 13 years in the university’s robotics control course.
More details are available in my CV.
My name suits me perfectly — I’m passionate about nature, animals, and adventure, which you can see in my artwork and photography. I’ve explored over 30 countries so far, with many more on my list! I have an adorable rescue husky, Sky. When I’m not out exploring or working with robots, you will probably find me horseback riding, singing my heart out, baking something sweet, lost in a good book, or writing stories. Life is an adventure and I like to live every part of it fully.