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About

Nancie Gunson is a researcher specializing in social robotics, conversational AI, and human-robot interaction, with a particular focus on deploying intelligent dialogue systems in real-world healthcare and built environments. Her work sits at the intersection of natural language processing and robotics, exploring how social robots can meaningfully assist people in demanding settings such as hospital waiting rooms and memory clinics. Gunson's most influential contribution — a 2024 paper on multi-party conversational social robots using large language models (22 citations) — demonstrates her leadership in advancing LLM-driven dialogue architectures capable of managing complex, multi-participant interactions in real time. Alongside this, her research on developing conversational robot receptionists for healthcare (12 citations) highlights her commitment to practical, human-centered applications that could meaningfully reduce clinical staff workload. Her multi-party multimodal work involving patients, companions, and robots in a hospital memory clinic (12 citations) further underscores her expertise in nuanced, real-world deployment. With contributions spanning visually-aware robot receptionists, intelligent building agents, and gerontological care robots under the EU H2020 SPRING project, Gunson's cumulative citation record reflects a growing recognition of her work's relevance. She is an emerging voice shaping how conversational AI and social robotics can serve vulnerable populations.