LIREC meeting in London

Ylva and Sara are going to London 8-10 of February to attend a LIREC meeting. Their ambition with the meeting is to discuss how to work with scenarios as a design-tool in robot research, and to go from this towards design requirements.

I'm back!

After being on parental leave during 2009, I'm now looking forward to face new interesting research challenges! I'm very happy to soon start developing forecasts about future scenarios of technology use, in a collaboration project between Wireless@KTH, Mobile Life and several industry partners. I'll also continue my work in the LIREC project about everyday robotics and ethics. Furthermore, I'm hoping to soon contribute with new funding and interesting projects at the Mobile Life Centre!

Cheers,

Sara Ljungblad

LIREC project in New Scientist - Learning to love to hate robots

Maria Håkansson has been interviewed in New Scientist about our long-term study of the robotic toy dinosaur Pleo in the homes of families. Read the article here!

SIGGRAPH Asia in Yokohama

Lars Erik Holmquist chairs the Emerging Technologies section of SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, in Yokohama, Japan. In Emerging Technologies, attendees experience works that show how computer graphics and interactive techniques are evolving to adapt to new technical, social, and environmental conditions. We collaborated with Södertörn University to produce a teaser video for the exhibition:

Maria receives grant from Nokia Research

Maria Håkansson has received a personal grant from Nokia Research Center Helsinki to do a user study of location-based services from a non-urban perspective! The project is planned for January-March 2010.

Rob Tieben working on ActDresses

Rob Tieben is working since september on the actDresses project: changing the appearance of robots in order to change their behaviour. Feed-back and feed-forward at the same time, incorporated in tags, wearables, or perhaps even robot clothes.
Rob is a student from the University of Technology Eindhoven, he is with us for 3 months and he is sharing his thoughts and ideas about the project on this blog

Henriette Cramer joins as a Postdoc at FAL

Henriette Cramer is a new ERCIM postdoctoral fellow at SICS and the Mobile Life Centre.

Henriette's done her PhD-research at the University of Amsterdam, where she focused on user interaction with autonomous and adaptive systems. Her experiments and user studies looked at people's reactions and trust when they interact with systems that appear to take their own decisions (e.g. spam filters, on-screen art recommenders, social robots). She's been looking at themes such as system autonomy vs. user control, transparency and systems' social behaviours such as proactivity, touch and empathy. Her work shows that people can show quite interesting unanticipated behaviour based on their perceptions and understanding of a system. She's also shown that 'features' suggested in the literature such as social behaviour and explanations for results cannot be directly applied in every situation.

More on her blog.