Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab - SIRRL

Last Friday we had a great day at the Spring Symposium of the RoboHub!

We showcased our robots at the exhibition and Ellie Sanoubari gave a lightning talk on our research.

Last week one of our lab members Samira Rasouli attended the CHI'26 conference.

Samira presented her paper titled “𝐂𝐨-𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐔𝐬𝐞𝐫 𝐄𝐯𝐚𝐥𝐮𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐑𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐌𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐥 𝐖𝐞𝐥𝐥-𝐁𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐂𝐨𝐚𝐜𝐡 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐔𝐧𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐒𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬’ 𝐏𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜 𝐒𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐧𝐱𝐢𝐞𝐭𝐲”, and participated in the panel discussion at the ACM CHI Conference, held in Barcelona, Spain, from April 13–17, 2026.

This work, published in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), was selected for presentation at the ACM CHI Conference. This paper presents a co-design study with mental health professionals and a participatory design study with university students to develop a fully autonomous robotic mental well-being coach aimed at helping students manage public speaking anxiety, which is highly prevalent in this population. This was followed by a user study with 50 university students to evaluate the system’s usability and acceptability. The robotic mental well-being coach system achieved a high usability score, was perceived as knowledgeable and competent, and was associated with significant improvements in participants’ self-reported mood. Overall, the findings show promising potential for robotic coaches in supporting students with public speaking anxiety.

Authors: Samira Rasouli, Moojan Ghafurian, Kerstin Dautenhahn

You can find the paper here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3718084

This week two of our lab members presented their work at HRI2026!

Soomin Shin took part in the Pioneers Workshop and presented her work "From Co-design to Deployment: Towards Sustainable & Scalable Socially Assistive Robots for Speech-Language Therapy".

Neil Fernandes, co-supervised by Yue Hu , presented his paper "Co-designing a Social Robot for Newcomer Children's Cultural and Language Learning".

Link to papers: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3776734.3794628, https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3776734.3794350

Where will this take place? University of Waterloo



Children will receive a small 3D-printed gift at the end and

a lab tour to meet different social robots. Each family will

in addition receive a $20 gift card.



Have any questions ? Email [email protected]

7 papers from SIRRL were accepted to RO-MAN 2023.

Robots helping children with disabilities stay on track on Springwise!

Robots helping children with disabilities stay on track - Springwise The robots use jokes and breathing exercises to help students focus

University of Waterloo Media Relations talked to Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn about great potential for using social robots in the public education system.
Engineering researchers at the University of Waterloo are successfully using a robot to keep students with learning disabilities focus on their work.

Robot helps students with learning disabilities stay focused | Waterloo News Engineering researchers at the University of Waterloo are successfully using a robot to help keep children with learning disabilities focused on their work. This was one of the key results in a new study that also found both the youngsters and their instructors valued the positive classroom contribu...

SIRRL member, Pourya Aliasghari, was awarded a FOE University of Waterloo Graduate Scholarship for his academic achievements in Fall 2022 term.

Article by Akgun, Ghafurian, Crowley, Dautenhahn in IEEE Trans. on Affective Computing proposes emotions as a communication modality in search and rescue robots and a method for using lights to convey a range of emotions in appearance constraint robots: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9947064

Check out this new book on Socially Interactive Agents by Birgit Lugrin, Catherine Pelachaud, and David Traum: https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/3563659. SIRRL members Moojan Ghafurian, John Munoz, and Kerstin Dautenhahn contributed to a chapter on Socially Interactive Agents for Supporting Aging.