About the Furhat Conference

The Furhat Conference Creators Edition took place in November 2022 and featured the work, stories and insights of the innovative creators of the global social robotics community. From entrepreneurs to researchers, students and robotics enthusiasts, the conference featured the diversity of ideas and people that are making the dream of social robots a reality.If you missed the conference, don’t worry! The recordings of the different talks are available below. However, the post-presentation discussions, Q&A, and Furhat demonstrations were not recorded as this content is reserved for live attendees only. And don’t forget about the conference tutorial! It is now available online so you can learn to create your own skills using the Furhat platform.

Speakers

Listen to the talk recordings from Ian, Arushi, Benjamin, Léa, Ella and Thomas, as they showcase their work within the fields of social robots and conversational AI.

Ian Bernstein

Robotics

Ian Bernstein is the Head of Product and Engineering at Titan Space Technologies. He was previously Founder and Head of Product at Misty Robotics and Co-Founder/CTO at Sphero, where he helped ship over 4 million robots, including the Sphero Star Wars BB-8. He holds an Electrical Engineering degree from Colorado State University.

Arushi Jindal

Senior Data & AI Consultant at Kyndryl

Arushi is part of Kyndryl's AI advisory team with 10 years of experience in software engineering and data science. She focuses on solving business problems through data and innovative technologies. Currently, she is integrating Furhat robots with chatbot technologies for client-specific use cases.

Benjamin Kille

Postdoctoral Researcher at NTNU

Benjamin is a postdoctoral researcher at the Norwegian Center for AI Innovation, NTNU, with a PhD from Technische Universität Berlin in context-aware news personalization. His research focuses on personalization, NLP, and applied machine learning, and he develops generative language models for Norwegian at NorwAI. He is also exploring applications in social robotics.

Léa Haefflinger

Ph.D student, ATOS / Gipsa-lab

Léa is a Doctoral student at ATOS and Gipsa-lab in Grenoble, France. Her research explores attention management in multi-party interactions for social robots, focusing on generating gaze and head movements for a robot in a collaborative game.

Ella Velner

PhD Student at University of Twente

Ella Velner is a PhD student at the University of Twente, specializing in responsible child-robot interaction, with a focus on voice and trust. She holds an MSc in Information Systems from the University of Amsterdam (2019) and a BA in Communication and Information Sciences from VU Amsterdam.

Thomas Beelen

PhD Student at University of Twente

Thomas Beelen is a PhD student at UTwente. He obtained his master’s degree in Human Computer Interaction & Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology and UTwente, and has a BSc in Creative Technology from UTwente. His PhD is on child-robot interaction with a focus on eliciting child speech on their information needs during conversational search.

Furhat tutorial

Creating your first skill with the Kotlin Skill API

Creating situated, multi-party conversations with a social robot that includes social behaviour, multi-modal expression and user awareness is a daunting task. At Furhat Robotics we have created a Skill Framework that is both easy-to-use and powerful enough to allow researchers and innovators to orchestrate these rich and complex interactions.This tutorial will teach you who are new to the Furhat Platform the fundamentals of creating skills for Furhat using the Kotlin Skill API, and for those of you who are more experienced with the Furhat Platform, you will get useful tips and tricks to speed up and increase the quality of your skills.In the tutorial we will create a simple skill that includes:

– Spatial awareness of the interaction space
– Mixed initiative dialogue
– Multi-modal expressions
– Variation and natural behaviour
– No pre-perquisites required.

To get a head start, checkout the Furhat SDK playlist on YouTube and get the Furhat SDK.

The Furhat Conference – Creators edition

About the Furhat Conference

Speakers

Ian Bernstein

Arushi Jindal

Benjamin Kille

Léa Haefflinger

Ella Velner

Thomas Beelen

Furhat tutorial

The Research
Resources Zone

The Furhat Conference – Creators edition

About the Furhat Conference

Speakers

Ian Bernstein

Arushi Jindal

Benjamin Kille

Léa Haefflinger

Ella Velner

Thomas Beelen

Furhat tutorial

The ResearchResources Zone

The Research
Resources Zone