Iolanda Leite has accepted a postdoctoral assistant position with the lab and will be joining us in October of 2013 to assist on the NSF Expedition in socially assistive robotics. Iolanda received her PhD from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal under the supervision of Professor Carlos Martinho and Professor Ana Paiva. [Click here to download a copy of her dissertation- Long-Term Interactions with Emphatic Social Robots]
Her research concerns the role of affect in long-term interaction between humans and artificial companions, either robots or virtual agents. In particular, she explores aspects such as empathy and user adaptation, in the attempt to build autonomous characters capable of establishing engaging interactions with children over time.
While completing her PhD, she worked as a Research Assistant at GAIPS the Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Characters Group, where she was involved in projects such as LIREC (Living with Robots and Interactive Companions) and EMOTE (EMbOdied-perceptive Tutors for Empathy-based learning). In the last year, she spent some time in the US working as a lab associate at Disney Research, Pittsburgh.