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
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/
6 December 2010
, Mor Naaman came to visit. He’s an expert in social multimedia.
At ACM Multimedia in Florence in October 2010, I REALLY enjoyed the SSPW (Social Signal Processing net) workshop. Speakers included Jeff Cohn from CMU, Toyuaki Nishida (Uni of tokyo), Sandy Pentland (MIT) and Justine Cassell (CMU). It was definitely one of the highlights of 2010. Very inspiring!
I also went to the Institute of Systems and Robotics of the Instituto Superior Technico of Lissabon to learn more about their work and to consider the Icub as a potential social learner. Cato is also three which is the same age Icub is programmed to be in its exploration of world objects.
I went to Lissabon to visit our Partner IDmind for the DHRS-CIM project, which is a project that concerns robots for environmental monitoring. We went to visit YDreams, a company that specialises in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality applications. It was really great and we decided on working out a joint proposal for a Tour Guide Robot that uses Augmented Reality Overlay to show information to visitors. Fingers crossed!
Vanessa Evers 