March 16, 2026
I spent a fantastic week at a wonderful conference in Edinburgh this week. Human Robot Interaction has grown from a few hundred to around eight hundred delagtes over the last few years and the organisers at Heriot Watt did a fantastic job. Especially the local organisers, Marta Romeo and Mary Ellen Foster who gave us brilliant workshop day and wonderful events.
I was honoured to be a co-chair of the Alt.HRI and was incredibly impressed with the quality of the papers and the wonderful presentations of provocative and edgy research. A special mention goes for authors of the best Alt.HRI paper, We Cannot Outsource What We Value Most: Toward Deployable Research Products in HRI by Kayla Matheus and Brian Scassellati. The paper stood out both in terms of the presentation, which was excellent, provocative and also a lot of fun and for its topic area which is of particular timely interest for the HRI community. The paper is also very well written offers a constructive and thoughtful appraisal of the issue of the failure of commercial robotic companies.
I also was very pleased to talk with the wonderful people at Pollen Robotics . You can see me pictures with the incredibly cute and very cost effective little table top social robot Reachy Mini. I want one!