News
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Paper accepted at EMNLP 2026
Our paper “Speaker gaze and disfluencies during storytelling toward a robot or a human: The role of partner type and temperamental shyness,” co-authored with Adriana Hanulíková, has been accepted for the Multimodal Interaction in Face-to-Face Dialogue (MINT) Workshop at the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). The study examines how gaze and pausing during storytelling vary when…
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Knowledge Transfer on Social Robotics at “Türen auf mit der Maus”
As part of “Türen auf mit der Maus” 2026, a nationwide outreach initiative by WDR (West German Broadcasting), we collaborated with CNRS to offer children the opportunity to interact with a social robot as a form of embodied AI. Children first interacted with the technology and subsequently reflected on their experiences, including how such technologies should be designed, what they…
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Late-breaking work accepted at RO-MAN 2026
I am happy to share that our late-breaking work with Adriana Hanulíková, Disfluencies in robot- and human-directed narration: Preliminary findings on partner effects and temperamental shyness, has been accepted for presentation at IEEE RO-MAN 2026 in Kitakyushu, Japan. In this work-in-progress, we examine how adults narrate stories to a social robot compared with a human partner.…
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Two new publications on social robots, children’s communication, and learning
In a new methods article in Frontiers in Communication, Katharina J. Rohlfing, Angela Grimminger, Kazuki Sekine, and I propose design principles for using social robots as standardized interaction partners in cross-cultural research on children’s gestures. Drawing on pilot work in Germany and Japan, the article discusses how robot-based paradigms can support culturally adaptable yet comparable ways…
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Paper Published in Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, Special Issue „Mechanisms of learning from social interaction“
Our new paper, “The relation between children’s shyness and their contingent dialogical actions when reacting to a social robot’s instructions,” is now published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B as part of a special issue on social contingency. In this collaboration with Valeriia Tykhonenko and Katharina Rohlfing, we examine how individual differences in shyness relate to preschoolers’ contingent dialogical actions…
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Paper Accepted in Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Our paper “Robot speech: how variability matters for child–robot interactions” has been accepted and published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI. In this work, we (Adriana Hanulíková, Nils Frederik Tolksdorf, and Sarah Kapp) argue that speech variability (e.g., prosody, lexical and pragmatic choices) is a crucial but often overlooked design dimension in child–robot interaction. We discuss key tensions around feasibility, desirability, and ethics,…
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Workshop Acceptance at ICSR 2026 (London)
We’re excited to share that our workshop “Configuring Robot Roles for Children: Developmental, Communicative, and Ethical Dimensions Across Contexts and Domains” has been accepted for the 18th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2026) in London. Call for Participation: We invite ~300-word abstracts (empirical, theoretical, design, methodological, or work-in-progress). Submissions are due April 20, 2026, with notifications on April 27, 2026.
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Funding for Project on Ethics in Child–Robot Interaction
I am pleased to share that our project ECHO (Ethics in Child–Robot Interaction) (PIs: Nils Tolksdorf, Adriana Hanulíková) has received ethics seed funding from Heidelberg University’s Camilla and Georg Jellinek Center for Ethics. In ECHO, we investigate the ethical implications of social roles of socially assistive robots and how such roles influence children’s interactions, learning, and normative expectations. Building on these insights,…
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Joining Heidelberg University in July 2025
I’m excited to share that I will be transitioning to a new academic position at Heidelberg University in July 2025. After truly enriching years at Paderborn University in Katharina Rohlfing’s SprachSpielLabor, where I’ve had the pleasure of working with wonderful colleagues and students, it’s time for a new chapter. At Heidelberg, I will be joining Adriana Hanulíková’s Lab at the Institute…
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Guest Editing a Special Issue on Variability in Child–Robot Interactions in Frontiers
Together with my co-editors Matthijs Smakman (HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht), Denise Geiskkovitch (McMaster University), Mike Ligthart (VU Amsterdam), and Sofia Serholt (University of Gothenburg), I’m excited to share that we have initiated and are guest editing a new Special Issue in Frontiers in Robotics and AI entitled: Personalized Robotics: Capturing Variability in Child–Robot Interactions in Education, Healthcare, and Daily Life. This Research Topic brings…
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