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About

Kasumi Abe is a pioneering researcher in child-robot interaction, with a particular focus on designing socially intelligent robots capable of building meaningful relationships with children. Her work spans robot personality adaptation, physical embodied communication, and AI-driven temperament estimation, placing her at the forefront of a field with profound implications for education, childcare, and family connectivity. Abe's most influential contributions include developing playmate robot systems that adapt their behavior to children's personalities — particularly shy or introverted children — earning over 30 citations each. Her ChiCaRo telepresence robot (2018, 32 citations) addresses the growing social challenge of intergenerational distance in aging societies, enabling remote grandparent-grandchild interaction with remarkable sensitivity to infant behavior. Her research on physical touch, including hand-holding and walking hand-in-hand, demonstrates how embodied contact can meaningfully accelerate trust between children and robots. More recently, Abe has integrated explainable artificial intelligence into toddler temperament estimation, making robot decision-making more transparent and interpretable. With a body of work accumulating over 170 citations, her research consistently bridges developmental psychology, robotics, and machine learning — offering a compassionate, child-centered vision of how robots might one day serve as genuine social companions.