It has been one month since I delivered the final draft of my PhD thesis.

Many things happened since this picture was taken. After a few days of (well deserved) rest, a paper submission and a quick trip to Amsterdam to present our SocialCom paper, I moved to Pittsburgh for an internship at Disney Research. In February, I return to Lisbon for the thesis defense.

Last week I was in Wroclaw for the final LIREC review meeting. I feel really fortunate to have been able to work in this project since day 1, and also a bit nostalgic because the project is finished now. But new challenges are coming! (more about that soon…)

Right now it’s time to finish writing the first draft of my thesis that needs to be ready by August 26… writing marathon, here I go!

Yesterday I started the final long-term study of my PhD Thesis! In the next 5 weeks I will spend most of my time at the elementary school where the study is taking place.

This is not the first user study I am running and so I know what’s waiting for me in the following weeks. I will be very stressed hoping that everything goes well – in other words, praying for the robot to behave in the way it is expected, nothing breaks, etc. I will also be very tired but, at the same time, extremely happy to see kids interacting with the robot I have programmed. The smile on their faces gives me more strength to continue than any accepted paper anywhere…

Picture taken in a user study last year.

Welcome to the academic side of my life!

Finally I got the time/patience  to create this site, something that was in my to-do-list for quite a while…

March was a pretty busy month for me, but who is not busy in the final year of her/his PhD? Besides all the thesis work (such as making the arrangements for my final user study to be run in April), I had to prepare a demo for CEBIT,  one of the largest technology fairs in Europe, and I also traveled to Boston to attend the HRI’12 conference where I presented the paper “Modelling Empathic Behaviour in a Robotic Game Companion for Children: an Ethnographic Study in Real-World Settings” (for more details check my Publications section).

Right after my presentation at HRI (which went quite well, by the way), I had the chance to visit some groups at the MIT media lab. In the Personal Robots group, I took these nice pictures with the robots…

Leonardo

and Nexi!