Seminar: Trustworthy and Ethical Human-Robot Interactions: Building Social Robots for Good

Today we are witnessing an increased robotisation in all areas of society, from manufacturing to assistive technology, from healthcare to education. These application areas require robots to be able to interact with humans in an efficient and socially acceptable manner. At the same time, like all technologies, robots may not only bring benefits, but also change how we think and behave. This calls for human-robot interaction researchers to design and develop more human-centric and trustworthy artificial intelligence and robotics, which put humans at the center and preserve human agency and autonomy. In this talk I will present examples of creating trustworthy human-robot interaction in education, healthcare and transportation systems from my research at the Uppsala Social Robotics Lab, investigating dimensions of human agency, autonomy, trust, transparency, and fairness, in the quest for more human-centric robots for the societal good.

Ginevra Castellano is a Professor in Intelligent Interactive Systems and Director of the Uppsala Social Robotics Lab at the Department of Information Technology of Uppsala University. She is the founder and Director of the Uppsala Social Robotics Lab. Her research is in the area of social robotics and human-robot interaction, addressing questions on how we can build human-robot interactions that are ethical and trustworthy, including robot ethics, robot autonomy and human oversight, gender fairness, robot transparency and trust, human-robot relationship formation, both from the perspective of developing computational skills for robotic systems, and their evaluation with human users to study acceptance and social consequences. Castellano has also an interest in governance of AI and robotics and has recently published a paper on a framework for a socio-legal robotics in the International Journal of Social Robotics. She has been / is Principal Investigator of several national and EU-funded projects on ethical and trustworthy human-robot interaction, in application areas spanning education, healthcare, and transportation systems (e.g., automotive and multi-drone systems). She has published over 150 papers on these topics, receiving over 6500 citations. She is the coordinator of the CHANSE-NORFACE MICRO (Measuring Children’s Wellbeing and Mental Health with Social Robots) project (2025-2028), leading a consortium of four partners. From 2012 to 2016 she was the coordinator of the EU FP7 EMOTE (EMbOdied perceptive Tutors for Empathy-based learning) project, which developed educational robots to support teachers in a classroom environment. Castellano was a General Chair at the ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) 2017 and the ACM/IEEE Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) 2023. She was the recipient of the 10-Year Technical Impact Award at the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction 2019 and the Frontiers in Robotics and AI 2021 Outstanding Associate Editor Award. She is a Senior Associate Editor of the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction and an Associate Editor of Frontiers in Robotics and AI, and a member of the Board of the Swedish AI Society. Castellano was a keynote speaker at the World Summit AI 2024 and an invited speaker the UN AI for Good Global Summit 2024.

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