2020

  • In September 2020 I’ve started my fellowship program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
  • I participated in the festival Cogito (see https://www.cm-oeiras.pt/pt/agenda/Paginas/cogito_18.aspx) in Oeiras, where I spoke about emotions in robots.
  • I gave a keynote talk at the IEEE RO-MAN’2020 conference on the topic “Prosocial Robotics”.
  • I was awarded a fellowship at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

2019

  • I was elected a EurAI fellow by EurAI Fellows committee.
  • I participated and gave a short presentation on the 5th of June in the event organised by Culturgest in Lisbon, speculating about the future and the role of AI. More information about this event can be found in here.
  • Fernando P. Santos, whose dissertation was titled “Dynamics of Reputations and the Self-organization of Cooperation” and was supervised by Prof. Francisco C. Santos, Prof. Jorge M. Pacheco, and myself was awarded the Victor Lesser Distinguished Dissertation Award, in Montreal, May, 2019.
  • I gave a keynote talk at the Vodafone Business Conference in Porto on “Social Artificial Intelligence”.
  • I gave an invited talk at Portuguese Academy of Sciences, with the title “Artificial Intelligence: from the real to the artificial”, March, 2019.
  • I gave an invited talk at the XXIX Annual Meeting of the Portuguese Society of Psychoanalysis, with the title “Real and artificial emotions: the role of artificial intelligence in the future of the relationship between humans and machines”, March, Lisbon Portugal.
  • I gave a keynote talk at the Workshop on “Expressivity for Sustained HRI” in the HRI’19 Conference, with title” Emotions in Groups of Humans and Robots”, March, Daegu, Korea, 2019.
  • I gave a keynote talk at the Workshop on Robots for Social Good at the HRI’19 Conference, with title “Prosocial Robots: a vision”, March, Daegu, Korea, 2019.
  • I gave an invited talk at the Intelligent and Socially Interactive Ecosystem Symposium, with title “Modelling Sociality in Machines”, Honda Research Institute, March, Japan, 2019.
  • I gave a keynote talk at the Workshop on Robotics for education, with the title “Robots for Education: Challenging the role of robotics in Educational Settings”, Utrecht, Netherlands in February, 2019.
  • I gave a keynote talk entitled “Robots that Listen to People’s Hearts: The Role of Emotions in the Communication between Humans and Social Robots” in the workshop “Explainable Artificial Intelligence and Conversational Agents”,  in Delft, Netherlands, January, 2019.
  • I gave an interview in Antena 2 radio about AI and the Illusion of Life. You can hear it if you speak Portuguese (see https://www.rtp.pt/play/p783/e382749/antena2-ciencia)

2018

  • I gave an invited talk at the Vodafone Data-Science event in Lisbon with the title “Social Agents… a path towards Social Artificial Intelligence”, in December 2018.
  • Our team got two papers accepted for HRI’19 in South Korea. The papers are entitled: “Exploring Prosociality in Human-Robot Teams” and “The Stereotype Content Model Applied to Human-Robot Interactions in Groups”. We are so happy! South Korea here we go!
  • I gave a keynote talk at the  AIIDE 2018  conference (AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment ) at the University of Alberta in Canada, on November the 16th, with a title “When your gaming teammate is a social robot!”.
  • Our paper entitled “Evolution of collective fairness in hybrid populations of humans and agents” was accepted for AAAI’19. Yay!
  • I gave a keynote talk entitled “Multi-party interaction between groups of humans and robots: building teammates for a multi-cultural and ageing population” in the Shonan Seminar (Japan)  on “Multimodal Agents for Ageing and Multicultural Societies”.
  • The page of the FAtiMA-toolkit: The Emotion Engine for your AI Characters  is now online. This toolkit  is a result of years of research and development work aimed at creating tools  to help building emotional AI characters (both virtual and robotic). This toolkit was developed by a fantastic team at GAIPS.
  • I participated in the NSF-sponsored workshop on human-robot interaction and embodied conversational agents in Boulder Colorado, October, 2018. We had deep and interesting discussions and I feel that the two fields will gain enormously by this collaboration.
  • Our paper entitled “The Power of a Hand-shake in Human-Robot Interactions” was accepted for the IROS conference in Madrid this Fall. This work was a collaboration with the Robotics Institute (ISR) in particular the Vislab. The paper was a result of the work of students in the Social Robotics Course at IST and we are really happy with the work, specially because it is related with our “Pro-social Computing” vision.
  • I gave a keynote talk at the AAMAS’18 conference (Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Conference) in Sweden, this July, with a title “Ready Team Player One: Social Robots in Teams”.
  • I gave a keynote talk at the next UMAP’18 conference (User Modeling Adaptation and Personalisation) in Singapore, this July, with a title “Robots that listen to people’s hearts: the role of emotions in the communication between humans and social robots”.
  • Our paper entitled “What My Eyes Can’t See, A Robot Can Show Me: Exploring the Collaboration Between Blind People and Robots” was accepted for ASSETS this year, in collaboration with Tiago Guerreiro‘s team at FCUL. The paper was a result of the work of students in the Social Robotics Course at IST and we are really happy with the work.
  • Fernando Santos, a student supervised by Francisco C. Santos and co-supervised by me and Jorge Pacheco, defended his thesis entitled “Dynamics of Reputation and the Self-organization of Cooperation”. He did amazingly well! Well done Fernando! Good luck for your next challenge at Princeton University.
  • My student, Elmira Yadollahi (from the IST-EPFL PhD program and co-advised by Pierre Dillenbourg) won the “Student ICC award from ACM” at the IDC (Interaction Design for Children) conference this year with her work “When deictic gestures in a robot can harm child-robot collaboration”. This work also won an honorable mention in the best paper award category in IDC. I’m so proud of her!
  • Hang Yin, one of my PhD students doing a combined PhD program with EPFL, co-supervised with Prof. Aude Billard and Prof. Francisco Melo, defended his thesis on the 5th of June. Congratulations Hang!
  • I gave an invited talk on “The role of emotions in the communication between humans and social robots“, at the workshop on Affective artificial agents as models for affective science and psychology, organised by the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, Geneva, April 9th, 2018.
  • Our paper “Engineering Pro-sociality with Autonomous Agents” (co-authored with Francisco C. Santos and Fernando Santos), presented at  AAAI’18 this year, won the first prize of the Blue Sky Awards sponsored by the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) at the AAAI-18 Senior Member Presentation Track.
  • Our paper in “Justifying Failures in Human-Robot interactions” has been accepted as a full paper for the AAMAS’18!
  • The GAIPS group just got three papers accepted at HRI’18 in Chicago in March. Two of the papers are associated with the AMIGOS project and one with the Co-Writer project. We are so happy! Chicago, here we go..