Florian Kunneman

University of Applied Sciences Utrecht, Utrecht University, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Florian Kunneman is a leading researcher at the intersection of natural language processing and human-robot interaction (HRI), with a primary focus on making spoken dialogue with social robots more intuitive and robust. His work centers on dialogue management, capability communication, and audio processing to bridge the gap between human expectations and robot performance. In his highly cited 2024 survey on dialogue management in HRI (23 citations), Kunneman provides a comprehensive roadmap for designing conversational systems that can handle the complexities of real-world interaction. A key contribution is his concept of "capability communication," showing that when robots clearly explain their limitations, users engage in more natural and forgiving conversations (2025, 10 citations). He also tackles a critical technical challenge—robot ego-speech filtering—developing methods to isolate human speech from a robot’s own voice and fan noise using a single microphone (2024). This work enables more fluid, overlapping turn-taking, a hallmark of human conversation. Kunneman’s research is essential for anyone building social robots that must communicate clearly and listen effectively in noisy, unpredictable environments.