Gabriella Lakatos
University of Hertfordshire, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Papers
29
Total Citations
902
H-Index
11
About
Gabriella Lakatos is a human-robot interaction researcher whose work sits at the intersection of trust, social robotics, and assistive technology. Best known for her landmark 2015 study "Would You Trust a (Faulty) Robot?" — now cited over 470 times — she pioneered empirical investigation into how robot errors shape human willingness to cooperate, a question that remains central to safe human-robot collaboration. Alongside this, her work on the ethical and practical challenges of deploying social robots in home and healthcare environments has helped establish a foundational framework for responsible robot design. Lakatos has made particularly meaningful contributions to autism research, developing and validating methodologies that use the humanoid robot Kaspar to help children with Autism Spectrum Disorder build visual perspective-taking and Theory of Mind skills — capabilities that are often profoundly challenging for this population. Her research also spans animal-inspired robotics, exploring how dog-like communication signals and zoomorphic designs can make robots more intuitive and emotionally legible to human users. With a body of work spanning emotion attribution, affective expression design, and child-robot teaching paradigms, Lakatos demonstrates a consistent commitment to making robots not just functional, but genuinely trustworthy and socially meaningful partners.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Would You Trust a (Faulty) Robot?472 citations · 2015
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- 3Emotion Attribution to a Non-Humanoid Robot in Different Social Situations60 citations · 2014
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- 7Sensing sociality in dogs: what may make an interactive robot social?22 citations · 2013
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- 10Design and Evaluation of Affective Expressions of a Zoomorphic Robot16 citations · 2020