Robotics

Robohub Podcast – Embodied Interactions from Robotics to Dance, with Kim Baraka

Listen to another podcast from the team at Robohub. More podcasts from them can be found here.

In this episode, Lauren Klein speaks with Kim Baraka about his PhD research to enable robots to engage in social interactions, including interactions with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Baraka discusses how robots can plan their actions across multiple modalities when interacting with humans, and how models from psychology can inform this process.

He also tells us about his passion for dance, and how dance may serve as a testbed for embodied intelligence within Human Robot Interaction.

Kim Baraka

Kim Baraka is a postdoctoral researcher in the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, and an upcoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where he will be part of the Social Artificial Intelligence Group.

Baraka recently graduated with a dual PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, USA, and the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Lisbon, Portugal.

At CMU, Baraka was part of the Robotics Institute and was advised by Prof. Manuela Veloso. At IST, he was part of the Group on AI for People and Society (GAIPS), and was advised by Prof. Francisco Melo

Subscribe to Robohub on iTunes, RSS, or Spotify

Lillian Clark

Lilly Clark is a PhD Student in the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Southern California.

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