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About

Abeer Alwan is a leading researcher at the intersection of speech processing and human-robot interaction, with a particular focus on child-robot communication. Her work addresses the critical challenge of enabling effective spoken language interaction with robots, a key bottleneck in realizing the full potential of social robotics. Alwan’s most impactful contribution, the 2021 article "Spoken language interaction with robots: Recommendations for future research," has garnered over 100 citations, establishing a foundational roadmap for the field. She has pioneered the use of social robots as interactive interfaces for educational and clinical assessments, notably developing the JIBO Kids Corpus—a unique speech dataset from 110 children aged 4–7 engaged in classroom tasks with the JIBO robot. Her pilot studies demonstrate how social robots can effectively elicit curiosity in STEM topics from kindergarten and first-grade students, while also exploring their utility in administering language, literacy, and speech pathology assessments. This innovative work bridges speech technology, developmental psychology, and robotics, offering practical tools for scalable, engaging educational interventions. Alwan’s research is shaping the future of how robots listen to and learn from young speakers.