Caroline’s dissertation entitled “The next best friend: How children perceive and relate to a social robot” won the 2022 Top Dissertation Award within the Children, Adolescents and Media (CAM) division of the International Communication Association (ICA)! She received her award during the annual ICA conference, which this year took place in Paris.
May 2022
On November 11th, Caroline has successfully defended her doctoral dissertation entitled “The next best friend? How children perceive and relate to a social robot”! While her time as a PhD student has thus come to an end, Caroline will remain part of the CHILDROBOT team as a postdoctoral researcher. The university published a short read about her dissertation research that can be accessed via: https://www.uva.nl/en/content/news/news/2021/10/children-and-robots-future-friends.html
November 12th, 2021
Our paper “The Wizard and I: How Self-description and Transparent Teleoperation (Do Not) Affect Child-Robot Perception and Relationship Formation” won the top student-led paper award at the Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA)! The open-access publication is available via: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00146-021-01202-3.pdf
Caroline is co-organizing a workshop entitled “Interdisciplinary Research Methods for Child-Robot Relationship Formation”, to be held virtually at HRI2021 on the 8th of March! The half-day workshop will open with a keynote by Prof Iolanda Leite, followed by break-out sessions and plenary discussions moderated by Prof Mark Neerincx and Prof Vanessa Evers. For more information and the CFP (extended abstracts due Feb 8), visit the workshop website: https://child-robot-interaction.github.io/
July 10th, 2019
In fall 2019, we started collecting data for a new study and we finished the project right after New Year’s! In this study, children asked all sorts of questions to NAO, learning about robots through its answers. Now it’s our time to learn from them while we analyze the data! A big ‘thank you’ to all participating schools, children, and their parents.
January 24th, 2020
This summer, we will carry out several studies in the NEMO Science Museum! During these studies, children can meet multiple kinds of robots. We are very enthusiastic about spending some hot summer days in this cool scientific environment, and hope to see many new faces!
July 10th, 2019
At the recent conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) in Washington DC, Jochen has been named an ICA fellow by the Board of Directors of the ICA. ICA fellowships are awarded in recognition of contributions to the study of human and mediated communication and to the ICA.
June 4th, 2019
On the 2nd of May, we brought our robots to Rotterdam for Expeditie Next – a science festival for children that was organized in light of the presentation of the national research agenda. Following the screening of the short film “Mr. Hublot”, Chiara presented on the question whether robots can be pets. Afterwards, children could interact with three of our robots themselves. An update on the things we learned from these interactions can soon be expected!
May 6th, 2019
Jochen attended the 14th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction, which took place in Daegu, South Korea from March 11 to March 14. He presented his ideas on “Communication Research and Human-Robot Interaction: Bringing in Interpersonal Communication Theory” in the workshop entitled “Human-Machine Communication: What Does/Could Communication Science Contribute to HRI?”
March 21st, 2019
Nowadays, you don’t even need to travel to attend a conference! On March 18th, Caroline video-presented her research entitled “Technological and interpersonal trust in child-robot interaction: An exploratory study” at the 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, which was held in Southampton.
December 20th, 2018
This November, we visited the InScience International Science Film Festival with our NAO robot. We collected very interesting data and, based on that, are currently developing a follow-up study. We would like to thank all the children that participated in this study and the InScience team for having us at this great festival!
December 4th, 2018
Over the past few weeks, we took our robot to six primary schools across The Netherlands. We finished our data collection at PCBO de Bouwhof: the primary school Caroline attended! Many thanks to all schools, teachers, parents, and – in particular – to all the children who participated in our research. The data collection is complete, but we’ll meet again once we have the results!
November 5th, 2018
Last September, we had the pleasure of visiting the International Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts (ARSO) in the beautiful city of Genoa. Chiara presented one of our future studies, and we learned a lot about the potential impact of artificial intelligence and autonomous systems on society.
October 4th, 2018