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About

Magda Bugajska is a pioneering researcher in human-robot interaction (HRI), whose work has profoundly shaped how robots perceive, communicate with, and collaborate alongside humans. Operating at the intersection of cognitive science, robotics, and natural language processing, she has made foundational contributions to some of the field's most enduring challenges. Her most celebrated work explores perspective-taking in robots — the capacity for machines to model a human partner's point of view — which has garnered over 300 citations and remains a touchstone in socially intelligent robotics. Equally influential is her research on spatial language for human-robot dialogue, demonstrating how robots can interpret and respond to natural spatial descriptions in conversation, earning over 220 citations. Her early work on multimodal human-robot interfaces (219 citations) helped establish the principle that robots with human-like features invite human-like communication. Bugajska also led the Peer-to-Peer HRI project, developing frameworks for genuine task collaboration between human and robot partners, and contributed the HRI Operating System — a structured software infrastructure enabling robots to discuss goals and capabilities. Her ACT-R/Embodied cognitive architecture further advanced robots' ability to integrate vision and audition in real-world settings. With applications ranging from space mission operations to humanoid tool use, her research legacy is both broad and deeply consequential.