Mythbusted!

The University of Twente had it’s 50 year anniversary. The mythbusters received a honorary degree for bringing science to a wide international audience.

International Conference on Social Robotics

We hosted the Conference on Social Robotics in Amsterdam from 23-25 November! Jaap Ham form Eindhoven University, takayuki Kanda from ATR  and myself were general chairs, Bilge Mutlu from Wisconsin Madison, and Christoph Bartneck from Christchurch uni NZ were program Chairs. The conference was wonderful and showed excellent PhD student work from around the globe. Robotgarage presented the neatest moving robot ever.

Frog Project KICK off

The FROG project started! We have an excellent team with Imperial College, Ydreams, Idmind, UPO Spain and University of Amsterdam. We’ll be building a Fun Robotic Outdoor Guide for Outdoor Tourism! And it’s going to use augmented reality. Could it get any better?

ACCOMPANY project Kick off

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Rieks op den Akker, Ben Krose and Care-o-bot3 at Kerstin Dautenhahn’s robot house in Hertsfordshire. The EU FP7 project ACCOMPANY has started! At HMI, we will investigate robot roles, personalities and long-term interaction in home environments.

New foto of our Human Media Interaction Group at Twente University!

 

And there it is! A foto of the entire HMI team (give or take a couple of people).

Dr. Dr. Egon van den Broek defends his second PhD thesis!

 

 

Friday 16 September, Egon van den Broek succesfully defended his second PhD thesis. The first was in 2005 on Human Centred Content-Based Image retrieval. This thesis is titled: Affective Signal Processing, unraveling the mystery of emotions. Congratulations Egon!

My talk about human-aware robots at the Roboned meeting

I gave a talk about socially normative behaviour for robots at the Dutch Roboned meeting, a great Dutch initiative to stimulate the synergy between the robotics fields and to formulate a focus. A short story came out of this by science journalist Jan Taco te Gussinklo (in Dutch)

http://www.dutchbuttonworks.com/2011/05/human-aware-robots/

http://www.roboned.nl/IIP-RN-kanaal/IIP_RoboNED-About-RoboNED.html

Marcel Heerink’s promotion

3 November was a very proud day. Marcel did his thesis defence and was awarded the PhD degree of the University of Amsterdam. The title of his PhD Thesis:Assessing Acceptance of Assistive Social Robots by Aging Adults. http://www.narcis.nl/publication/id/1/Language/en/coll/person/RecordID/oai:uva.nl:356908

 

 

HRI PC meeting

In December 2010, I hosted the Human Robot Interaction Program Committe meeting. It was awesome to have so many HRI prominents around for a few days. I had to fibb to the press to keep them away from some of the famous scientists so we could focus on the papers. It is going to be a great conference this year! http://hri2011.net/

Mor Naaman’s visit

6 December 2010, Mor Naaman came to visit. He’s an expert in social multimedia.

http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~mor/