Overview

I am currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Twente. Before going back to academia, I was a Data Scientist a the Machine Learning and AI group of Miele & Cie. Inc. Before I was a postdoc and project lead at the Cologne Cobots Lab (CCL), working on developing and deploying social robots in public spaces (e.g., museums, shopping malls, transportation hubs). Before joining the CCL, I was a postdoc in the ERC project The Future of Prediction led by Prof. Esposito, working on the social consequences of predictive AI, and at the HRI Laboratory at Kyoto University, led by Prof. Kanda, working on mobile persuasive social robots in public spaces. I studied Bioinformatics, Genome Research and Intelligent Systems at Bielefeld University, University of Helsinki and Aalto University. I received a B.Sc in Bioinformatics and Genome Research in 2009 and a M.Sc. in Intelligent Systems in 2011. After completing my M.Sc., I joined the Applied Informatics Group and worked on the SocialRobots project on socially assistive robots to promote physical activity for long-term space missions. I was a Ph.D. student at the CITEC Graduate School and was supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Franz Kummert.

My main research interest is in Human-Robot Interaction with a focus on socially assistive scenarios. It combines interdisciplinary approaches from social psychology, sports science, sociology, and computer science to develop and evaluate assistive technologies. I work on designing interactive scenarios with social robots, modeling and analyzing the persuasive effects of personalized feedback for companions, and developing and testing algorithms for adaptive personalizable social robot companions. Currently, my main goal is to understand how a system can interactively learn a user’s preference and adapt to a user’s task desires in online learning scenarios.