Social Robotics at the Crossroads of AI and Cognitive Science

On 7 November 2025 at 13:30, join us for a thought-provoking exploration of how artificial intelligence and cognitive science are shaping the future of social robotics. At this event, Dr. Emilia Barakova (TU/e) and Dr. Alessandra Sciutti (IIT) will explore embodied, adaptive robotics that respond to human needs and emotions through physical interaction, non-verbal cues, and personalised engagement. Join us to discover the future of socially attuned robotics.

To attend, please register using the link below. You can provide your email address to receive updates, including any changes to the venue. Register here.

Event Program and Location

  • 13:30 – Opening of the event
  • 13:40 – Dr. Emilia Barakova: A Multimodal Approach to Measuring and Modulating Affective Arousal in Persons Interacting with/through Assistive Robots and Smart Objects in Care Settings.
    This presentation synthesises research on designing multimodal interventions to address emotional challenges, such as stress, agitation, and lack of engagement, in vulnerable populations including seniors with dementia and neurodivergent children and their parents. Embodied social technologies – such as the Dynamorph, a tactile interactive table, and the LiveNature ambient environment, with a sheep-like social robot as a tactile interface – use rich tactile stimulation and physical touch strategies, like inviting users to pet or squeeze soft objects, to generate calmness, reduce agitated behaviors, and promote positive engagement. In attempt to objectively measure affective outcomes, our research incorporates physiological sensing, employing devices like the Smart sock that embeds Shimmer sensor to record electrodermal activity (EDA) and Heart-rate variability (HRV) which serve as implicit markers of arousal and stress. Other context-aware smart objects like the ApEn pen detect stress behaviors by monitoring handwriting and hand-holding pressure, providing sensory feedback such as light or vibrotactile alerts to increase user awareness. These platforms integrate physiological or behavioral input to dynamically modulate affective states, enabling supervised autonomous social robots (such as MiRo-E and NAO) to deliver tailored interventions, including breathing exercises and visualization techniques for people with disabilities, successfully reducing negative physiological arousal and supporting emotion co-regulation within dyads of children and parents. Overall, the findings underscore the significant role of integrating tactile engagement, advanced physiological sensing, and multimodal stimuli in designing effective robot mediated systems for mental health support.
  • 14:30 – Dr. Alessandra Sciutti: Embodied Artificial Cognition: A Path Toward Shared Understanding.
    As robots move from being tools to becoming partners in shared human environments, mutual understanding becomes a defining challenge. This talk explores how artificial cognition—an embodied, brain-inspired alternative to conventional AI—can enable this shift. By grounding robotic intelligence in the principles of human development and the dynamics of interaction, this approach allows robots to perceive, anticipate, and adapt to human intentions in ways that feel intuitive and socially attuned. A key aspect of this transformation lies in non-verbal communication: movement, timing, effort, and emotional tone all convey meaning beyond words. When robots learn to interpret and express these subtle cues, collaboration becomes more transparent and trustful. Drawing inspiration from how humans learn to understand one another, we discuss how memory, anticipation, and adaptive behavior can empower robots to engage naturally in complex social exchanges. Ultimately, embodied artificial cognition not only advances human-robot interaction but also offers new insights into the nature of understanding itself.
  • 15:20 – Closing of the event

The event will be in Vergaderzaal 1.1, Baekeland Technologiepark-Zwijnaarde 130, Campus Ardoyen, Ghent.

The Speakers

We are honored to feature two distinguished researchers in the field of social robotics and human-robot interaction. Emilia Barakova is an Associate Professor in Social Robots and Embodied Intelligent Agents at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), where she leads the Social Robotics Lab and the Transdisciplinary Research & Design research cluster. Her research bridges embodied social interaction, artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences, and robotics, with a focus on enhancing well-being through social robots for people with visual impairments, intellectual disabilities, and dementia, as well as applications in education and special education. Barakova’s work emphasises embodied social interaction and the integration of AI into physically interactive, socially competent robots.

Alessandra Sciutti is a Senior Tenure Track Researcher and head of the CONTACT (COgNiTive Architecture for Collaborative Technologies) Unit at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa. Her research investigates the sensory and motor mechanisms that underpin mutual understanding in both human-human and human-robot interactions. Her work explores joint perception and collaborative technologies, aiming to create robots that can naturally engage and adapt to human social cues. She is also a recognized leader in the field, serving as co-chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee for Cognitive Robotics and as an ELLIS scholar.

Organisers: Giulio Antonio Abbo, Tony Belpaeme

Sponsored by the Flemish government