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About

Robert Garofalo is a pioneering researcher in social robotics, with a focus on human-robot trust, emotional perception, and cognitive architectures for symbiotic interaction. His work addresses a critical challenge: how can robots earn and maintain human trust in collaborative settings? His most-cited paper, “Promises and trust in human–robot interaction” (2021, 84 citations), investigates how humans trust social robots that embody emotional states, a foundational study for deploying intelligent machines in real-world applications. Garofalo also designed a unique social perception system (2016, 35 citations) that integrates facial expression, physiological signals, and auditory cues to assess users’ emotional states unobtrusively. He led the EASEL Project, which developed a synthetic tutor assistant for educational human-robot symbiotic interaction, contributing multiple architecture papers (2016, 26 and 17 citations). His early work on Damasio’s somatic marker theory for social robotics (2015, 14 citations) laid groundwork for emotion-driven decision-making in robots. By merging neuroscience insights with engineering, Garofalo has advanced robots’ ability to perceive, respond to, and earn trust from humans, making him a key figure in creating socially intelligent machines for education, healthcare, and beyond.