Mari Velonaki Email & Phone Number

Vision: To innovate by creating technological systems that complement and enhance the human experience.I am a Professor of Social Robotics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. I am also the founder and director of the Creative Robotics Lab (Art, Design & Architecture UNSW) and the founder and director of the National Facility for Human-Robot Interaction Research (UNSW, USYD, UTS, St Vincent’s Hospital). I am a Research Leader at the UNSW Ageing Futures Institute. My contributions are in the areas of Social Robotics, Responsive Systems, and Human-Machine Interface Design. Contributions include:• Created novel interfaces between a human and a robot that include the modalities of movement as body language, and touch as an encoder of human emotion.• Created interactive robots that are of human scale and have a substantial presence in the physical world. • Introduced open experimentation whereby robots are placed in public spaces (not tested only in laboratory settings).• Through my research I have assembled two of the world’s largest datasets (over 690,000 recorded interactions in 13 countries) in human-robot interaction (HRI) studies that provide valuable information on the qualitative dimensions of human-machine relations.I am the recipient of several competitive grants, including Australia Research Council Discovery, Linkage, ARC LIEF, an ARC Fellowship, an Australia Council of the Arts Fellowship, NICTA, Australia-Japan Foundation, U.S. Airforce, Fuji Xerox Innovation (Japan), DST (Army). My robots and responsive agents have been exhibited worldwide, including: Victoria & Albert Museum, London; National Art Museum Beijing; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea; Aros Aarhus Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh; Millennium Museum - Beijing Biennale of Electronic Arts; Ars Electronica, Linz; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabruck; ZENDAI Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Sydney; Conde Duque Museum, Madrid; Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao.