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About

Henny Admoni is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction (HRI), social robotics, and assistive technology. Her work spans several interconnected areas, including social eye gaze, nonverbal robot behavior, shared autonomy, and socially assistive robotics — fields in which she has made foundational contributions that continue to shape how researchers and engineers design robots that interact naturally with humans. Admoni's most cited work, "Robots for Use in Autism Research" (2012, 914 citations), highlights her early focus on leveraging robots as therapeutic tools for individuals with autism spectrum disorders, demonstrating that robots can uniquely elicit social engagement in children. Her landmark review of social eye gaze in HRI (2017, 564 citations) established an influential three-part framework for understanding how gaze functions in human-robot interactions, becoming an essential reference for the field. Her research into deliberate handover delays and robot nonverbal behaviors reveals a nuanced understanding of how subtle robot actions can meaningfully improve human compliance and collaborative task performance. More recently, her development of SocNavBench (2022) provides the community with a standardized framework for evaluating social robot navigation — addressing a critical gap in reproducible HRI research. Across her body of work, Admoni has consistently bridged cognitive science, robotics, and human factors to build robots that are not only functional, but genuinely socially intelligent.