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About

Barbara Gonsior is a pioneering researcher in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), whose work focuses on making robots more socially intelligent and effective communication partners. Her key contributions lie at the intersection of emotional expression, prosocial behavior, and multimodal feedback in HRI. Gonsior’s most influential work, “Improving aspects of empathy and subjective performance for HRI through mirroring facial expressions” (89 citations), demonstrated that robots capable of mimicking human facial expressions can significantly enhance user empathy and perceived performance. Her innovative “emotional adaption approach” (55 citations) successfully transferred social-psychological principles from human-human interaction to HRI, showing that robots can proactively trigger increased helpfulness from humans. Gonsior also made notable contributions to proactive HRI in human environments, exploring how robots can effectively combine speech, gesture, and emotional mimicry to navigate public spaces and retrieve information from humans. Her work on dialog strategies for handling miscommunication and multimodal feedback guidelines has been foundational for developing robots that can operate robustly in noisy, real-world settings. Gonsior’s research has collectively garnered over 200 citations, establishing her as a key figure in creating more empathetic, responsive, and socially capable robots.