Iolanda Leite, Ph.D.

Iolanda is a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University at the Social Robotics Lab under the direction of Prof. Brian Scassellati. She is working on the NSF Expedition in Socially Assistive Robotics. Iolanda received her PhD in June 2013 from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), University of Lisbon, Portugal under the supervision of Professor Carlos Martinho and Professor Ana Paiva. [Click here to download a copy of her dissertation- Long-Term Interactions with Empathic Social Robots]

Her research concerns the role of affect in long-term interaction between humans and social robots. In particular, she explores aspects such as empathy and user adaptation, in the attempt to build autonomous robots capable of establishing engaging and meaningful interactions with children over time.

While completing her PhD, she worked as a Research Assistant at GAIPS, the Intelligent Agents and Synthetic Characters Group, where she was involved in EU-funded projects such as LIREC (Living with Robots and Interactive Companions) and EMOTE (EMbOdied-perceptive Tutors for Empathy-based learning). In the fall of 2012, she spent some time in the US working as a research intern at Disney Research, Pittsburgh.

Research Interests

Long-term Human-Robot Interaction, Affective Computing, Multimodal Perception, User Modeling, Adaptive Behavior Generation and Child-Robot Interaction.