The 9th Furhat conference on Social Robotics

Social robotics research
in the age of AI

Wednesday Oct 15th 2025
4:00-6:00 PM CET (10:00-12:00 PM EDT)

Welcome to the 9th Furhat Conference on Social Robotics


Themed "Social robotics research in the age of AI” the conference will take place on Wednesday October 15th at 4:00-6:00 PM CET (10:00-12:00 PM EDT).

The rapid adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) marks a new chapter for social robotics research. Where past research often focused on scripted dialogues and constrained environments, today’s advancements in AI have opened the door for more autonomous, natural and meaningful interactions. At the conference, we will explore how research in social robotics is evolving with the adoption of LLMs and other cutting-edge AI technologies.

This conference will be one of the biggest yet as we will also unveil our new API for research that gives users a powerful new toolkit to enable advanced interaction design, seamless two-way communication between Furhat and external devices, real-time analysis of Furhat’s audio and video streams, integration with offline LLMs and speech models, and much more.
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Speakers

We bring you experts from leading global research institutions in the field of HRI

Robots as Communicative Partners in Education: Designing Meaningful Interactions in the Age of AI

Dr. Prof. Ilona Buchem

Professor of Communication and Media Science at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences (BHT)

Ilona Buchem's research focuses on human-robot interaction in educational settings, learning experience design, educational technology and AI in education. With her background in communication science, she explores how multimodal interaction, dialogue design, and communicative strategies shape human perceptions and experiences with social robots. She has served as a jury member of the Deep Tech Award in Robotics and has been involved in national and international projects on the use of social robots in educational and elderly care contexts.

Towards Episodic Memory for Conversations with Social Robots

Dr. Prof. Kristiina Jokinen

Senior Collaborative Researcher at AIST and Adjunct Professor University of Helsinki and University of Tampere

Dr. Jokinen's research focuses on human-robot interaction, (Gen)AI-based dialogue modelling, grounding, and multimodal communication, and she has published widely on these topics. She developed Constructive Dialogue Model as a general framework for interaction, and together with Graham Wilcock she developed the Wikipedia-based robot dialogue system WikiTalk, which won the Special Recognition for Best Robot Design (Software Category)at the International Conference of Social Robotics in 2017.

Conference agenda

16:00
10 minutes
Conference Opening
Opening by Jessica Wenninger and Samer Al Moubayed
16:10
15 minutes
Robots as Communicative Partners in Education
Prof. Dr. Ilona Buchem
16:25
5 minutes
Furhat Community Updates
Latest updates in the Furhat Community
16:30
15 minutes
Dr. Bahar Irfan
Applying General Turn-taking Models to Conversational Human-Robot Interaction
16:45
10 minutes
Furhat Realtime API Demo
Gabriel Skantze
16:55
5 minutes
Coffee Break
17:00
15 minutes
Towards Episodic Memory for Conversations with Social Robots
Prof.Dr. Kristiina Jokinen
17:15
15 minutes
Multilingual Social Robots Bridging AI and Bureaucratic Challenges
Shaul Ashkenazi
17:30
10 minutes
Announcements and closing remarks
Jessica Wenninger
Conference Introduction
Conference Records

Exlusive demos of Furhat and our new API

At the conference we will demonstrate how you can create more advanced and exciting interactions with Furhat using our new API for research.

Previous conferences

Explore past Furhat Conferences and discover previous speakers, presentations, and highlights

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