A new start in Lincoln

The past few months have been busy - I attended the Human-Robot Interaction conference in Christchurch (New Zealand), and then I packed up and left Plymouth, after six (near enough) very happy and relatively productive years with Tony Belpaeme's HRI group.

Now, I have joined the University of Lincoln (U.K.) as a lecturer (I'm not sure, but it's supposedly similar to a US/rest of the world Assistant Prof, but permanent rather than tenure-track...) in the School of Computer Science. I'm also a member of the Lincoln Centre for Autonomous Systems, which is a relatively large research group covering a range of (you guessed it) autonomous robotic systems, human-robot interaction/collaboration, and bio-inspired machine vision. It's an exciting place to join - the School and the research group are expanding rapidly both in terms of student numbers and research projects/income, and we're due to move into a new purpose-built building over the next year (I'm moving in the next few weeks...).

So, what are my plans for the future? Broadly speaking, to research and teach, or to teach and research, whichever way you choose to look at it. In terms of research, I intend to continue my general line of research involving the combination of cognitive/developmental robotics and social human-robot interaction. It's going to a little while before I get the things in my head up and running in the real world, but hopefully not too long.

An exciting, and yet fairly daunting time for me - learning a new place, new colleagues, new procedures. However, I'm looking forward to it! Apparently this is my 200th post on this blog. Apt perhaps that this is a new start.

2nd Workshop on Cognitive Architectures for Social Human-Robot Interaction

In a follow-up to the first iteration of the workshop, I'm organising the next version of the workshop on Cognitive Architectures for Social HRI (with Greg Trafton and Severin Lemaignan). It will take place immediately before the International conference on Human-Robot Interaction, in Christchurch (New Zealand), on Monday the 7th of March 2016.

You can find all the necessary details on the workshop website.

The focus this time will specifically be on how social interaction (between robots and humans in particular, but not necessarily exclusively) can be supported by cognitive architectures - and what functions and mechanisms are required for this. To this end, we asking that all authors answer a set of six specific questions in their submissions, to provide a basis for comparison, and to initiate discussions as the workshop.

I hope to see you there!