Affective Social Robots and Interaction Studies for Children with Disabilities

KUIS AI Talk by Hatice Köse

Istanbul Technical University

Affective Social Robots and Interaction Studies for Children with Disabilities

Date/Time:  January 9, Tuesday, 10:00 am in ENG 208 

Zoom Link: https://kocun.zoom.us/j/7988699195

Abstract: 

I will be summarizing our projects on the affective social humanoid robots for the education and health applications of children with disabilities. We develop affective modules to recognize the behaviours, attention, emotion and stress of children based on the data (physiological, facial, audio, an gaze) collected during their interaction with the robots and the sensory setup. We also work on the affect based serious games and exergames for children.

Short Bio: 

Prof.Dr. Hatice Köse is the head of the AI and Data Engineering Department of the Faculty of Computer and Informatics Engineering, Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Turkey, coordinating the Cognitive Social Robotics Lab, and Game and Interaction Technologies Lab. She is in the academic board of Computer Engineering, Mechatronics, and Game and Interaction Technologies Graduate programs and former coordinator of the Computer Engineering Graduate Program. She received her BSc, MSc, and PhD degree from the Computer Engineering Department, Bogazici University, Turkey. In 2006-2010, she worked as a Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, in the EU Project RobotCub. She was a visiting researcher at Imperial College in 2010, and at University of Manchester in 2016. Her current research focuses on affective and social robots for children. Her research team is working on the emotion/stress recognition of children, and gesture/sign language recognition/generation in robots. Her motivation is to use the assistive robots and turn-taking based interaction games in the therapy and education of children with communication impairment (children with hearing impairment and children with Autism). She is leading several research projects, supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK), and ITU Scientific Research Foundation, and takes part in several Horizon2020 projects and Cost actions. IEEE Senior Member since March, 2019.