Elmira Yadollahi

Elmira Yadollahi
Lancaster University | LU · School of Computing and Communications

PhD
Assistant Professor

About

32
Publications
4,481
Reads
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259
Citations
Introduction
My current research is focused on studying the cognitive capabilities required by the robot to produce a socially and technically well-structured interaction with children in learning contexts. My goal is to provide a successful interaction and beneficial learning activity for a child-robot interaction in learning environments. Currently, I am working on two scenarios of co-learning interaction with a Nao robot with primary school children: CoReader and CoCounter.
Additional affiliations
February 2017 - October 2021
Instituto Superior Técnico
Position
  • Doctoral Student
November 2016 - October 2021
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
Position
  • Doctoral Student
September 2012 - February 2015
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Position
  • Master's Student

Publications

Publications (32)
Preprint
Full-text available
To facilitate human-robot interaction and gain human trust, a robot should recognize and adapt to changes in human behavior. This work documents different human behaviors observed while taking objects from an interactive robot in an experimental study, categorized across two dimensions: pull force applied and handedness. We also present the changes...
Preprint
Full-text available
The workshop is affiliated with 33nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2024) August 26~30, 2023 / Pasadena, CA, USA. It is designed as a half-day event, extending over four hours from 9:00 to 12:30 PST time. It accommodates both in-person and virtual attendees (via Zoom), ensuring a flexible particip...
Preprint
Full-text available
Research reproducibility - i.e., rerunning analyses on original data to replicate the results - is paramount for guaranteeing scientific validity. However, reproducibility is often very challenging, especially in research fields where multi-disciplinary teams are involved, such as child-robot interaction (CRI). This paper presents a systematic revi...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Human-robot collaboration (HRC) relies on smooth and safe interactions. In this paper, we focus on the human-to-robot handover scenario, where the robot acts as a taker. We investigate the feasibility of detecting the intention of a human-to-robot handover action through the analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Our study confirms that te...
Preprint
Full-text available
Children growing up in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be most impacted by the technology across their life span. Participatory Design (PD) is widely adopted by the Interaction Design and Children (IDC) community, which empowers children to bring their interests, needs, and creativity to the design process of future technologies. While...
Preprint
Full-text available
Despite great advances in what robots can do, they still experience failures in human-robot collaborative tasks due to high randomness in unstructured human environments. Moreover, a human's unfamiliarity with a robot and its abilities can cause such failures to repeat. This makes the ability to failure explanation very important for a robot. In th...
Article
Movies and news reports represent for many the first source of interaction with social robots. Congruently, as tools for the dissemination of popular representations of robots, movies can have a direct impact on public perception, acceptance, and discourse about this type of technology. In this article, a content analysis of popular movies and fran...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Spatial understanding and communication are essential skills in human interaction. An adequate understanding of others’ spatial perspectives can increase the quality of the interaction, both perceptually and cognitively. In this paper, we take the first step towards understanding children’s perspective-taking abilities and their tendency to adapt t...
Article
Multisensory integration influences emotional perception, as the McGurk effect demonstrates for the communication between humans. Human physiology implicitly links the production of visual features with other modes like the audio channel: Face muscles responsible for a smiling face also stretch the vocal cords that result in a characteristic smilin...
Article
Full-text available
The evolving field of human-robot interaction (HRI) necessitates that we better understand how social robots operate and interact with humans. This scoping review provides an overview of about 300 research works focusing on the use of the NAO robot from 2010 to 2020. This study presents one of the most extensive and inclusive pieces of evidence on...
Chapter
Revealing the internal workings of a robot can help a human better understand the robot’s behaviors. How to reveal such workings, e.g., via explanation generation, remains a significant challenge. This gets even more complex when these explanations are targeted towards children. Therefore, we propose a search-based approach to generate contrastive...
Chapter
Full-text available
Perspective taking is an important skill to have and learn, which can be applied in many different domains and disciplines. While the ability to recognize other’s perspective develops in humans from childhood and solidifies during school years, it needs to be developed in robotic and artificial agents’ cognitive framework. In our quest to develop a...
Article
Full-text available
In this article we investigate the role of interactive haptic-enabled tangible robots in supporting the learning of cursive letter writing for children with attention and visuomotor coordination issues. We focus on the two principal aspects of handwriting that are linked to these issues: Visual perception and visuomotor coordination. These aspects,...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The use of robots as peers is more and more studied in human-robot interaction with co-learning interactions being complex and rich involving cognitive, affective, verbal and non-verbal processes. We aim to study the co-learning interaction with robots in the light of perspective-taking; a cognitive dimension that is important for interaction, enga...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
In this paper, we present a robotic approach to improve the teaching of handwriting using the tangible, haptic-enabled and classroom-friendly Cellulo robots. Our efforts presented here are in line with the philosophy of the Cellulo platform: we aim to create a ready-to-use tool (i.e. a set of robot-assisted activities) to be used for teaching handw...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper describes research aimed at supporting children's reading practices using a robot designed to interact with children as their reading companion. We use a learning by teaching scenario in which the robot has a similar or lower reading level compared to children, and needs help and extra practice to develop its reading skills. The interact...

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