Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Jekaterina Novikova is a researcher specializing in human-robot interaction (HRI), affective computing, and social robotics, with a particular focus on how robots can communicate emotions to foster more natural and effective collaboration with humans. Her most influential work centers on developing frameworks for emotionally expressive robotic behavior — most notably her 2014 paper "A Design Model of Emotional Body Expressions in Non-Humanoid Robots" (42 citations), which established a foundational approach to making robot movements intelligible to human observers. Alongside her companion piece on artificial emotions for social coordination (40 citations), this work positioned her as a leading voice in robot affective behavior design. Novikova has also advanced the field of spoken dialogue systems, exploring how hybrid chat-and-task approaches powered by reinforcement learning can make robot interactions more engaging and adaptive (33 citations). Her experimental studies further demonstrated that emotionally expressive behavior meaningfully improves human-robot collaboration outcomes. Spanning tutoring robots, multimodal dialogue systems, and simulation environments, her research consistently bridges cognitive science, machine learning, and robotics. With over 160 cumulative citations across her most-cited works, Novikova's contributions offer students and researchers a rigorous yet human-centered roadmap for building socially intelligent robots.