Jonas Beskow
Papers
38
Total Citations
874
H-Index
12
About
Jonas Beskow is a pioneering researcher in social robotics and human-robot interaction, based at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. He is perhaps best known as the principal architect behind **Furhat**, a back-projected humanoid robot head that has become one of the most influential platforms in multiparty human-robot interaction research. His seminal 2012 paper introducing Furhat has accumulated nearly 300 citations, reflecting the platform's widespread adoption and impact across the field. Beskow's work spans facial animation, gaze behavior, turn-taking dynamics, and emotionally expressive robotics. His research on gaze — including studies on mutual gaze and the perceptual mechanics behind works like the Mona Lisa — demonstrates a sophisticated blending of psychology and engineering. Notably, he has advanced data-driven methods to equip social robots with culturally sensitive facial expressions, challenging the assumption that emotional displays are universally uniform across cultures. Beyond robotics, Beskow has contributed to motion capture reconstruction using neural networks and self-supervised speaker detection for socially aware language acquisition. His deployments in public museum settings, reaching thousands of visitors, underscore a commitment to real-world validation. Collectively, his body of work positions him as a foundational figure in building machines capable of genuinely naturalistic social interaction.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
- 2
- 3Taming Mona Lisa75 citations · 2012
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7Look but Don’t Stare: Mutual Gaze Interaction in Social Robots32 citations · 2017
- 8
- 9
- 10