Jacqueline Kory Westlund

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Human Media

Papers

Total Citations

480

H-Index

About

Jacqueline Kory Westlund is a leading researcher in human-robot interaction, focusing on how social robots can support early childhood education. Her work centers on affective personalization and language learning, demonstrating that robots can be more than tools—they can be adaptive, empathetic learning companions. Her most cited paper, "Affective Personalization of a Social Robot Tutor for Children’s Second Language Skills" (306 citations), shows that tailoring a robot’s emotional responses to a child’s state can significantly enhance tutoring effectiveness, rivaling one-on-one human instruction. She also explores how robot language complexity impacts children’s storytelling and vocabulary acquisition (87 citations), and her long-term deployment studies in preschool classrooms (46 citations) provide vital lessons for real-world HRI research. Westlund co-developed Tega, an expressive, squash-and-stretch social robot platform designed for sustained child-robot interaction (37 citations). Her work bridges robotics, developmental psychology, and education, offering practical insights for designing robots that engage, teach, and grow with young learners. Through rigorous field studies and innovative platform design, she has helped shape how we think about robots as socially intelligent partners in early learning environments.