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About

Kristiina Jokinen is a prominent researcher specializing in human-robot interaction, multimodal communication, and conversational AI. Her work has profoundly shaped how humanoid robots engage with humans, with a particular focus on integrating verbal and non-verbal communication to create more natural, intuitive interactions. Jokinen is perhaps best known for her pioneering implementation of WikiTalk — an open-domain spoken dialogue system — on the Nao humanoid robot, a body of work that generated significant scholarly attention across multiple publications in 2012-2013, collectively accumulating over 220 citations. Her research systematically explored how non-verbal cues such as gestures, gaze, head movements, and body posture can enrich robot-human dialogue, establishing foundational frameworks still referenced today. Beyond gesture and speech integration, Jokinen has advanced the frontier of adaptive social robotics, investigating how robots can infer users' apparent personalities from body language using deep learning, and how conversational AI combined with knowledge graphs can enable robots to deliver high-quality, contextually relevant information. Her 2016 volume *Dialogues with Social Robots* further cemented her influence as a synthesizing voice in the field. With research spanning robot cognition, topic management, and user experience evaluation, Jokinen remains an essential reference for students and researchers pursuing socially intelligent machines.