Andreea I. Niculescu

About

Andreea I. Niculescu is a prominent researcher specializing in human-robot interaction, social robotics, and conversational interface design. Her work sits at the intersection of speech technology, affective computing, and robot sociability, with a particular focus on how design choices shape the way humans perceive and engage with artificial agents. Niculescu's most influential contribution examines how voice pitch, humor, and empathy affect robot attractiveness, a paper that has garnered over 310 citations and remains a landmark reference in social robotics. Building on this, her earlier work on voice pitch and robot receptionists helped establish foundational insights into how acoustic qualities influence human evaluations of robotic characters. Her doctoral dissertation further broadened her scope, systematically analyzing design factors in task-oriented spoken dialogue systems. Beyond voice and affect, Niculescu has explored humor in human-computer interaction, multimodal human-robot interaction frameworks, and the social integration of industrial robots. Her ethnographic study of shipyard welding practices demonstrates a commitment to grounding robot design in real-world user needs. Deployments such as "Olivia," one of the earliest real-environment social robot receptionists, underscore her dedication to translating laboratory research into tangible, public-facing applications. Her body of work has meaningfully advanced how researchers and designers approach socially intelligent machines.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Making Social Robots More Attractive: The Effects of Voice Pitch, Humor and Empathy

   310 citations · 2013
2. 2
   The influence of voice pitch on the evaluation of a social robot receptionist

   52 citations · 2011
3. 3
   Conversational interfaces for task-oriented spoken dialogues: design aspects influencing interaction quality

   24 citations · 2011
4. 4
   Humor in Human-Computer Interaction: A Short Survey

   18 citations · 2017
5. 5
   Multi-robot collaborative platforms for humanitarian relief actions

   13 citations · 2015
6. 6
   Socializing with Olivia, the Youngest Robot Receptionist Outside the Lab

   12 citations · 2010
7. 7
   An integrated framework for multimodal human-robot interaction

   8 citations · 2017
8. 8
   Why Industrial Robots Should Become More Social

   5 citations · 2014
9. 9
   Understanding welding practices on shipyards: an ethnographic study for designing an interactive robot welder

   3 citations · 2014
10. 10
    How humans behave and evaluate a social robot in real-environment settings

    2 citations · 2010

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links