In this seminar, Agnes Axelsson will present her work in the field of human-robot interaction and social robotics. Building human-robot interactions is incredibly difficult because the field of robotics is incredibly wide compared to the expectations in the human user’s mind. Agnes will present a summary of previous work from her PhD, working on social robotics for museum presentations and in autonomous transport, to her most recent postdoctoral experience in the Netherlands applying them to the study of individuals with severe mental illness. The throughline is that we, paradoxically, can learn more about the human, and sometimes about the system, by how the interaction fails and breaks down, than from how it succeeds and works.

Agnes Axelson did her PhD in social robotics under supervisor Gabriel Skantze at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. After defending her thesis in November of 2023, she moved to the Netherlands, and contributed to the RISE project on helping individuals with severe mental illness monitor their relapses through technological means. Pending a signature from CSIC, she is about to start in a COMFUTURO/Marie Curie project tracking the neurolinguistic process of creating common ground with a robot in elderly users, under the supervision of Raquel Ros and Séverin Lemaignan.