Sarah Gillet

Today's society is increasingly polarized, with growing impressions of “us vs. them” in various aspects of everyday life. This phenomenon is known as in-group favoritism and it was found that people act more favorably towards in-group members than towards out-group from as young as the age of 5. Could we make use of social robots to help us overcome the phenomenon of in-group favoritism and improve the quality of social interaction in everyday groups?

I am a Ph.D. student in the division of Robotics, Perception, and Learning, focusing on the field of Human-Robot Interaction. My goal is to develop social robot behavior that aims to foster collaboration and inclusion to overcome group biases shaped by in-group favoritism. This social robot behavior thereby enfolds into understanding a group and its biases and generating robot behavior that counteracts the perceived group biases.

With my background in Computer Science and Robotics, I address both these aspects of the social robot behavior from a computational perspective. Nonetheless, aspects such as group cohesion and prosociality as measures of the social aspects of a group are important for me to be able to design advantageous social robot behavior.

In my current work, I focus on understanding how a social robot can act as a mediator to help the inclusion of newly arrived children.

If you are interested in writing a master thesis or taking the course DD2411 within my project, please feel free to contact me under sgillet(at)kth(dot)se.