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About

Merihan Alhafnawi is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of swarm robotics, human-robot interaction, and social computing. Her work fundamentally reimagines robot swarms not merely as tools for physical tasks, but as dynamic, interactive canvases for social and artistic expression. Alhafnawi’s major contributions include the development of the **MOSAIX platform**, a swarm of up to 100 robot Tiles designed for social settings, where they facilitate human tasks like opinion-mixing and brainstorming—a novel application of swarm intelligence to deliberative democracy. She also introduced the concept of a **Robotic Canvas**, enabling humans to “paint” interactively onto a decentralized robot swarm, merging art with autonomous systems. Her research on self-organised saliency detection demonstrates how swarms can efficiently represent shapes using minimal robotic material, with applications from architecture to functional materials. With her most-cited works accumulating over 40 citations, Alhafnawi’s innovative approach has been recognized for expanding the boundaries of human-swarm collaboration, making her a leading voice in socially-aware robotics.