Shruti Chandra

Speaker

Dr. Shruti Chandra is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research laboratory at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She holds a Joint PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland and Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal. During her PhD, she worked on a project called Cowriter where she investigated how children could improve their handwriting skills with the help of a social robot. Her current research focuses on using social robots to aid children with learning difficulties, assist people with a developmental speech disorder, foster intergenerational game-play, and investigate social learning mechanisms between humans and robots. Her research interests include social, assistive and educational robotics, long-term human-robot interaction, autonomous robots, and artificial Intelligence.

Speaker Links: ResearchGate - Linkedin

Abstract

Research in child-robot interaction have found promising possibilities to benefit children in educational applications. In this talk, I will present some of my experiences using social robots in the seek to foster children’s learning and intergenerational gameplay interactions. Particularly, I will share my findings regarding diverse robot’s roles, children’s perceptions of robots and some challenges in the conduction of child-robot interaction studies. Lastly, I will introduce a tool that I am co-designing to facilitate the conceptualization of HRI gameplay scenarios.

Papers covered during the talk

• Chandra, S., Dillenbourg, P., & Paiva, A. (2019). Children teach handwriting to a social robot with different learning competencies. International Journal of Social Robotics, 1-28.
• Chandra, S., Alves-Oliveira, P., Lemaignan, S., Sequeira, P., Paiva, A., & Dillenbourg, P. Children’s peer assessment and self-disclosure in the presence of an educational robot.” Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2016 25th IEEE International Symposiumon. IEEE, 2016.
• Chandra, S., Aishwarya K Aravamuthan1, John E Muñoz, Katrin Fischer, Jennifer Boger, Kerstin Dautenhahn (2020, September). Explor-ing the role of social robots in inter-generational gameplay. In 2020 18th Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society ofNorth America (RESNA) Conference. (2020, Texas, USA.)