Join the seminars

Seminars will be held monthly, usually on the third Wednesday of the month at 3:00 pm GMT/BST. If you want to participate in the discussion via Zoom, please make sure to individually register for each seminar below.

Next Seminar

This talk introduces the concept of cognitive robotics, i.e. the field that combines insights and methods from AI, as well as cognitive and biological sciences, to robotics. In particular, we will focus on cognitive developmental robotics, which models the incremental learning and developmental acquisition of cognitive and sensorimotor skills in robots. The field of cognitive robotics is also important for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The development of cognitive skills in robots endows these artificial agents with the social and communicative capabilities to support smooth interaction with people. We will for example look at the development of grounded communication and of Theory of Mind skills in humanoid robots, and how these can support trust between people and robots. The talk will look at ongoing and future challenges in HRI and cognitive robotics. It will discuss the recent trend to move towards trust and interaction in heterogenous teams of robots and people, going beyond current dyadic one-person one-robot settings. Further, the implications for the use of LLM and VLA foundation models in HRI and cognitive robotics will be considered. This will lead to the discussion of the approach of “starting small”, and its repercussions for the current limitations of foundation models as cognitive models for language learning and understanding in AI and robots, and for HRI. 

Angelo Cangelosi is Professor of Machine Learning and Robotics at the University of Manchester (UK) and co-director and founder of the Manchester Centre for Robotics and AI. He was selected for the award of the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced grant (UKRI funded). His research interests are in cognitive and developmental robotics, neural networks, language grounding, human robot-interaction and trust, and robot companions for health and social care. Overall, he has over 400 publications and has secured £40m of research grants as coordinator/PI/co-I, including the ERC Advanced eTALK, the EPSRC CRADLE Prosperity, the US AFRL project CASPER++, and five ongoing Horizon RIA and MSCAs grants. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journals Interaction Studies and IET Cognitive Computation and Systems, and in 2015 was Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Development. He has chaired numerous international conferences, including ICANN2022 Bristol, and ICDL2021 Beijing. His book “Developmental Robotics: From Babies to Robots” (MIT Press) was published in January 2015, and translated in Chinese and Japanese. His latest book “Cognitive Robotics” (MIT Press), coedited with Minoru Asada, was published in 2022 and translated in Chinese in 2025.

You can also watch the seminar live on YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/po-5iDCjNfA 

Future SeminarS

To be announced!

Past SeminarS

Robots are increasingly becoming our social companions, tutors, and conversational partners. This talk explores the challenges and opportunities at the intersection of artificial intelligence and social robotics. Drawing on recent research, I will examine how large language models and multimodal AI are pushing the boundaries of human-robot interaction, enabling robots to interpret visual context, adapt their speech, manage turn-taking, and engage in open-ended dialogue. While discussing the practical hurdles that remain, from the nuances of child speech recognition to designing robots that alleviate loneliness in vulnerable populations, the talk reflects on the cognitive, technical, and social dimensions of building interactive social machines. 

Tony Belpaeme is a Professor at Ghent University (Belgium) and Senior Researcher at imec. At Ghent he leads a team studying cognitive robotics and human-robot interaction. Starting from the premise that intelligence is rooted in social interaction, Belpaeme and his research team try to further the science and technology behind artificial intelligence and social robotics. This results in a spectrum of results, from theoretical insights to practical applications. He coordinated several large-scale European projects studying how robots can support children while learning a second language and how long-term human-robot interaction can be use in paediatric applications.

Kerstin Dautenhahn, Dr. rer. nat., IEEE Fellow, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is Full Professor and Canada Research Chair in Socially Intelligent Robotics at University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. She is a member of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and is cross-appointed with the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, as well as the Department of Systems Design Engineering, and the Department of Mechanical and Mechatronics Engineering at University of Waterloo. In Waterloo she directs the Social and Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. Her research areas are social robotics, human-robot interaction, assistive robotics, cognitive and developmental robotics. She has published 130 peer-reviewed journal articles (H-Index 98), and frequently gives invited keynote presentations at international conferences., e.g. at IEEE RO-MAN 2025 in the Netherlands. She has several senior Editorial Roles in international journals, e.g. the International Journal of Social Robotics, and Interaction Studies.