** Postdoc position in social robotics**

Uppsala Social Robotics Lab

Department of Information Technology

Uppsala University, Sweden

Uppsala University is an international research university focused on the development of science and education. Our most important assets are all the individuals who with their curiosity and their dedication make Uppsala University one of Sweden’s most exciting work places. Uppsala University has 45.000 students, 6,800 employees and a turnover of SEK 6,300 million. The Department of Information Technology (http://www.it.uu.se/first?lang=en) is with approximately 275 employees, including 110 senior faculty and 120 PhD students, and more than 4000 students enrolled annually, one of Uppsala University’s largest departments.

The Uppsala Social Robotics Lab (http://hri.research.it.uu.se/) led by Dr. Ginevra Castellano aims to design and develop robots that learn to interact socially with humans and bring benefits to the society we live in, for example in application areas such as education and assistive technology.

We are receiving expressions of interest for an upcoming two-year postdoctoral researcher position in social robotics, specifically on the topic of social learning for co-adaptive social human-robot interactions.

The PhD student will have the opportunity to work in one or more projects on personalised and co-adaptive human-robot interaction, funded by the Swedish Research Council and the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research, in collaboration with KTH Stockholm and the University of Gothenburg.

The researcher will be part of the Uppsala Social Robotics Lab at the Division of Visual Information and Interaction of the Department of Information Technology.

The Uppsala Social Robotics Lab’s focus is on natural interaction with social artefacts such as robots and embodied virtual agents. This domain concerns bringing together multidisciplinary expertise to address new challenges in the area of social robotics, including mutual human-robot co-adaptation, multimodal multiparty natural interaction with social robots, multimodal human affect and social behavior recognition, multimodal expression generation, robot learning from users, behavior personalization, effects of embodiment (physical robot versus embodied virtual agent) and other fundamental aspects of human-robot interaction (HRI). State of the art robots are used, including the Pepper, Nao and Furhat robotic platforms. The Lab is involved in a number of different national and EU-funded projects in collaborations with international partners.

How to send expressions of interest:

To express their interest, candidates should submit a CV, a 1-page research statement and a cover letter (indicating the name of referees and the earliest possible start date) to Ginevra Castellano (ginevra.castellano@it.uu.se) by the 31^st of May.

Requirements:

Qualifications: The candidates must have a PhD degree in human-robot interaction or related areas relevant to the postdoc topic. Good programming skills and ability to conduct user studies are required. The PhD position is highly interdisciplinary and requires an understanding and/or interest in psychology and social sciences. Experience in machine learning for human-robot interaction is appreciated.