Merle Mirjam Reimann
Date:
Speaker
Merle Mirjam Reimann is a Postdoctoral researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, advised by Iolanda Leite. She did her PhD in Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she worked on capability communication in spoken human-robot and human-agent interaction. Merle is interested in (spoken) human-robot interaction, using robots in the wild, conversational agents, as well as dialogue management approaches. With her research she aims at contributing to making robots more understandable to users by communicating the robot’s capabilities through the interaction.
Papers covered
What Can You Say to a Robot? Capability Communication Leads to More Natural Conversations
Merle M. Reimann, Koen V. Hindriks, Florian A. Kunneman, Catharine Oertel, Gabriel Skantze, and Iolanda Leite. 2025. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ‘25). IEEE Press, 708–716. DOI: 10.1109/HRI61500.2025.10974151
Transparent Conversational Agents: The Impact of Capability Communication on User Behavior and Mental Model Alignment
Merle M. Reimann, Florian A. Kunneman, Catharine Oertel, and Koen V. Hindriks. 2025. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI ‘25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 48, 1–12. DOI: 10.1145/3719160.3736629
Motivation and context: Social robots in the wild and the novelty effect; A survey on dialogue management in human-robot interaction.
Abstract
When people interact with a robot that they are not yet familiar with, they do not necessarily understand what the robot can or cannot do. Especially, if the robot is employed in the wild, people who have no experience in interacting with robots might encounter it. Even for people who have experience with robots in general, it is not clear whether a newly encountered robot has the same capabilities as the ones they are used to. However, if we want to enable people to have efficient and smooth interactions with robots, users need to understand the robot’s capabilities and how to use them. In this talk I will discuss two studies on how communicating a robot’s and conversational agent’s capabilities during the interaction influences the user’s knowledge and their behavior.