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January 2026

After 4.5 good years at PAL Robotics, I am thrilled to announce that I have joined the Institute for Research in Artificial Intelligence (IIIA) of the Spanish National Centre for Scientific Research (CSIC) as a Research Scientist in Artificial Social Cognition.

From January 2026, I will co-lead the newly founded SocialMinds AI lab with Raquel Ros. The lab investigates Artificial Social Cognition with an interdisciplinary perspective, with colleagues from virtual worlds, sociology, education sciences, multi-agent systems, and of course, social robotics.

As you can expect, I will primarily focus on social robotics, developing a new line of research around deep representation for social cognition and social learning.

Exciting times ahead!

Summer 2021

A worldwide pandemic and the Brexit made it: after 6 years in the UK and 3 fantastic years at Bristol Robotics Lab, we are moving to Barcelona! and I am super excited to join PAL Robotics where I'll take the lead on the development of new social capabilities for their service robots.

Cherry on the cake: PAL Robotics has a great community ethos. Expect our cool social tech to be open-source!

November 2020

I am currently developing a new online tool to study social interaction in robotics, in a playful and... COVID-friendly way! I plan to have it both as a tool to teach robotics (incl. ROS) & human-robot interaction, but also as a research platform to conduct more immersive and interactive online studies.

First release expected early 2021. Stay tuned!

December 2019

Since this month, I am now officially Associate Professor in Social Robotics and AI.

Big shout-out to Chris Melhuish and Tony Pipe who both tirelessly supported my application!

October 2019

Very happy to announce that Emmanuel's landmark study on social robots automatically learning challenging social policies using Interactive Reinforcement Learning has been published in Science Robotics (open access)!

The article presents a novel human-in-the-loop machine learning approach to implement social autonomy in a robot, with several deployments in UK public schools. This is a first-in-kind demonstration of learning autonomous action policy in a high dimensional, socially complex, environment.

August 2019

Following Maddy's paper last month, Chris's work on dynamic generation (and repair!) of ambiguous language for human-robot interaction has been published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI (open access). Well done!

The article challenges the common understanding that robots should be unambiguous: we show that ambiguity is often desirable for fluid and natural human-robot interactions, and often leads to better performances, by not overloading the human participant with irrelevant informations.

July 2019

Inspiring visit in Hong-Kong, where I was invited as external expert to report on the findings of the Robot4SEN project: 70 robots deployed in 30 schools for children with special needs, over a period of 2 years. Fascinating and very humbling to see all these robots being adopted by pupils and teachers, and blended into the daily teaching!

Warm thanks to our hosts, the HK Vocational Training Council for the great organisation.

December 2018

I've just been invited by Bilge Mutlu to join the editorial board of the freshly launched Human-Robot Interaction section of the open-access Frontiers in Robotics and AI.

Looking forward receiving your submissions!

October 2018

Our paper The PInSoRo dataset: Supporting the data-driven study of child-child and child-robot social dynamics presenting the details of the PInSoRo dataset has just been published in open-access in PLOS ONE. If you are looking for a large (45+ hours) dataset of annotated, naturalistic child-child and child-robot social interaction, have a read, and download the dataset!

March 2018

We have presented our paper on how the HRI community sometimes overtrusts results in social psychology in the alt.HRI track of HRI 2018 conference. Go and have a read!

November 2017

I have been invited to give a keynote at the AAAI Fall Symposium 2017. I'll be talking about our new dataset of child social interaction and how deep learning could be a way forward for social robotics. The slides are online.

March 2017

Update! We have been awarded the Best 'Design' Paper Award for our paper on the Cellulo robot. Great!

We have two papers accepted for presentation at the HRI 2017 conference next March in Vienna!

The first one presents Cellulo, the new little robots we have created at EPFL: small, cheap, 'child-proof', holonomic and self-localised, they might well be the future of robotics in the classroom! And we already have many ideas how to use them to enhance learning in innovative ways, like this real-world simulation of molecules.

The second one reports on the results of our experimentations with automatic speech recognition for children: to put it simply, it does not work yet :-) Our dataset is online.

January 2017

I am giving a short talk at the Cognovo's Symposium on Group Creativity and Education on social robots and education ...or rather, "to be or not to be social" for a robot in a classroom.

The slides (and Latex sources) can be downloaded from my GitHub repository. Available under a Creative Commons license CC-BY-SA, as usual.

March 2016

Update! We have been awarded the Best 'Theory and Methods' Paper Award for our formalization of the idea of `With-me-ness' in robotics. Fantastic!

The annual Human-Robot Interaction conference is coming soon: I'll be flying New Zealand to present our last year's work on attention and engagement tracking between humans and robots (nominated for the Best Paper award!).

Alexis is going to present the results of 3 rather long studies where we show that robots can indeed help children struggling with hand-writing.

I'm also really glad to co-organize with Paul Baxter the (co-located) 2nd Intl. Workshop on Cognitive Architectures for Social HRI.

March 2015

Thanks to a press release by the EPFL media office, the CoWriter project got a lot of media coverage this month!

February 2015

On air! I've been interviewed for 25 min on the place of robots in our society by the Swiss national radio RTS. You can listen to the interview (in French!) online.

February 2015

I've been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship to work on the Theory of Mind for robots with Tony Belpaeme at the University of Plymouth (and Claire got one as well!). We are moving to UK next summer!

September 2014

I've been awarded the Best PhD in Robotics 2012 award by the French CNRS.