Robots and me on the Beeb!

Thank you so much to Spencer Kelly, Click and BBC for featuring my PhD research on robotic mental well-being coaches! It was great to chat with Spencer and see him interact with QTRobot.

You can watch the episode here!

It was cool to see all the other amazing work taking place at the Computer Lab, including earables and robot swarms. Makes me reflect back on the four years I’ve been lucky to spend there during my PhD. Starting to feel a bit nostalgic towards the end!

Here’s Spencer chatting with QT…

And QT mic’ed up!

Spencer did a brief positive psychology practice with QT. This is something I’ve explored in my research, in terms of how such interactions should be designed (together with robot users and professional well-being coaches), what a well-being robot should look like, and how a robotic coach should repair errors. I’ve also looked into the ethics of designing robotic coaches.

QT is running on the VITA framework, which incorporates a Large Language Model (LLM) in its architecture. VITA is multi-modal: it uses both video and audio as sensor input. VITA enables autonomous and adaptive robot behaviour over multiple interactions. Check out my collaborator Dr. Micol Spitale’s work to learn more about VITA and robot architectures!

My research is part of the broader research being undertaken at AFAR Lab under Prof. Hatice Gunes’ direction. Lots of interesting things to check out here if you’re curious about robots.