Title: Social interaction characteristics for socially acceptable robots

Abstract: The last decade has seen fast advances in Social Robotic Technology. Social Robots start to be successfully used as robot companions and as therapeutic aids. In both of these cases the robots need to be able to interact intuitively and comfortably with their human users in close physical proximity. In order to achieve a seamless interaction and communication these robots need to coordinate different aspects of their behaviors with their human interlocutors. This behavior coordination of non-verbal and verbal interaction cues requires that the robots can interpret the social behavior of the other and react accordingly. In this talk different ways to (socially) coordinate human and robot behavior will be discussed and illustrated with examples from recent Human-Robot Interaction research.

Biography: Dr. Lehmann is a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher in the iCub Facility at the Italian Institute of Technology, where he develops the SICSAR project, dedicated to generate and test social interaction behaviors for the iCub robot. Dr. Lehmann received his Diploma in Psychology from the Technical University Dresden, his MA degree in Psychology from the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Bath. In these years he has worked, from different interdisciplinary perspectives, on Evolution and Social Cognition, examining in particular possible reasons for the evolution of social structures in primates, the role of social dominance in this process, and social gaze behavior and its role in human social evolution. His current work is devoted to the application of this knowledge to the fields of Human-Robot Interaction and Social Robotics, through experimental research and with a particular focus on Robot Assisted Therapy and robotic home companions. Before his work at the IIT, he was part of the Adaptive Systems Research Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Hertfordshire, where he was involved in different European projects, e.g. iTALK, and ACCOMPANY.