In this talk I'll walk you through my research interests since I left the IIIA in 2008. Mainly, how I moved from working with a team of robots, to working with robots interacting with humans. Such shift of actors in the scene involves huge differences when it comes to developing robots. Human-Robot Interaction is a young field that is currently pushing the boundaries to achieve smooth interactions between people and robots challenging many assumptions done so far in robotics. I'll talk about my research in the ALIZ-E project, focused on child-robot interaction and some strategies aimed at sustaining long lasting interactions. 

Dr. Raquel Ros is a researcher at the Group on Media Technologies (GTM) working in the area of Human-Robot Interaction. She graduated in Computer Science from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona on 2003 and received her PhD from the Institut d'Investigació en Intel.ligència Artificial (IIIA-CSIC). In 2008 she moved to Toulouse as a Marie-Curie fellow to work in the area of HRI at the Laboratoire d'Analyse et d'Architecture des Systèmes (LAAS-CNRS) where she worked on collaborative robotics. She then moved to Imperial College London (Personal Robotics Lab) to continue her research on social robots in educational environments. After a stint in industry at Cambridge Consultants as user-center designer, she now is at La Salle-Universitat Ramon Llull in Barcelona, where she studies human-robot interaction and its interdisciplinary connection with cognitive sciences, psychology, sociology, health and education, with emphasis on long-term interaction