ABSTRACT:
Face-to-face interventions are the current gold standard in health and education. Yet, these services are expensive, frequently unavailable, or could be enhanced with other modalities. This talk addresses how social robots can serve as unique tools to solve important challenges in these critical domains. I will uncover the process of designing, creating, and deploying social robots in real-world contexts, to be used as valuable sources of knowledge and assistance that empower people to make decisions about their mental health, social-emotional learning, and creativity. By leveraging on methods from design research, social sciences, and engineering, I will walk through different practices for human-centered robot design and development. The vision behind my work is to democratize health care and education by using social robots to break barriers of access to these critical domains.

BIO:
Patrícia Alves-Oliveira is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Human-Centered Robotics Lab with Prof. Maya Cakmak at the Computer Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington. Patrícia received her Ph.D. in 2020 from ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon and spent time at Cornell University as a Visiting Graduate Scholar. Her research focuses on empowering human health and education by leveraging the qualities of social robot technology. Her interdisciplinary work unifies the fields of robotics, design research, and health sciences. She is the recipient of the Portuguese Graduate Research Fellowship and the Open Hardware Ada Lovelace Award. She was selected for the EECS Berkeley Rising Stars, the KTH Future Digileaders, and as an invited participant in the Dagstuhl Seminar. Her research received two Best Paper Awards at the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, and she has been a leader in the field of HRI for her roles in conference organization and by co-founding Talking Robotics.