Dr Mary Ellen Foster

Senior Lecturer in Human-Robot Interaction (School of Computing Science)

telephone: 0141 330 4742
email: MaryEllen.Foster@glasgow.ac.uk
pronouns: She/her/hers

S134, School of Computing Science, 18 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow, G12 8RZ

Biography

I joined the University of Glasgow in July 2015. From 2009 until 2015, I was a Research Fellow in the Interaction Lab in the School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at Heriot-Watt University. Before that, I worked in the Robotics and Embedded Systems Group at the Technical University of Munich and in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. I received my PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh in 2007.

Personal site: http://www.maryellenfoster.uk/

Research interests

Research overview

My main research goal is to build artificial characters---mainly robots---that people can interact with using natural, face-to-face conversation. Supporting this sort of interaction means that a robot must be able both to produce a wide range of appropriate social signals (speech, facial expressions, body language, gestures) and to understand the social signals produced by its conversational partners. To make this possible, we must (1) observe the signals used by humans in a range of situations, (2) build models of those behaviours that can be used by a robot for both input processing and output generation, and then (3) test how well the models perform when the robot must interact with humans.

Publications

List by: Type | Date

Jump to: 2025 | 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013

Number of items: 79.

2025

Blair, Andrew, Gregory, Peggy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7891-6666 and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2025) A Blessing or a Burden? Exploring Worker Perspectives of Using a Social Robot in a Church. In: 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2025), Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 25-29 Aug 2025, (Accepted for Publication)

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Ashkenazi, Shaul ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2705-9283, Skantze, Gabriel and Stuart-Smith, Jane ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7400-9436 (2025) The Multilingual Student Support Robot. In: 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2025), Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 25-29 Aug 2025, (Accepted for Publication)

Voges, Amelie, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Cross, Emily S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1671-5698 (2025) What Was I Made for? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Layperson-Designed Robots. In: 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2025), Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 25-29 Aug 2025, (Accepted for Publication)

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Stuart-Smith, Jane ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7400-9436, Ahmad, Muneeb and Hough, Julian (2025) Aye, Robot: What Happens When Robots Speak Like Real People? In: 2025 ACM Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) Conference, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 08-10 July 2025, ISBN 9798400715273 (Accepted for Publication)

Mackinnon, Callum and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2025) Lowering the Barrier: Conversational Interfaces as a Novice-Friendly Path to Data Visualisation. In: 2025 ACM Conversational User Interfaces (CUI) Conference, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 08-10 July 2025, (Accepted for Publication)

Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Cross, Emily ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1671-5698 (2025) Leveraging Social Robots to Promote Hand Hygiene: A Cross-Cultural and Socio-Economic Study of Children in Diverse School Settings. In: 2025 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2025), Melbourne, Australia, 04-06 Mar 2025, pp. 371-380. ISBN 9798350378931 (doi: 10.1109/HRI61500.2025.10974217)

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Lindsay, Alan, Ramirez-Duque, Andres and Petrick, Ronald P.A. (2025) A Socially Assistive Robot with Emotional and Cognitive-Based Coping Strategies for Children During Distressing Medical Procedures. International Symposium on Paediatric Pain (ISPP 2025), Glasgow, UK, 17-20 June 2025. (Accepted for Publication)

2024

Blair, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0453-1381, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Gregory, Peggy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7891-6666 (2024) Human-Centered Design of Social Robots: Addressing Stakeholder Involvement to Enhance Long-Term Interaction Success. In: Socially Interactive Agent Applications Workshop in the 24th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA '24), Glasgow, UK, 16-19 Sep 2024, (Accepted for Publication)

Voges, Amelie, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Cross, Emily S. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1671-5698 (2024) Human, Animal, or Machine? A Design-Based Exploration of Social Robot Embodiment with a Creative Toolkit. In: IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2024), Pasadena, California, 26-30 August 2024, (Accepted for Publication)

Lindsay, Alan, Ramirez-Duque, Andres A., Petrick, Ronald P.A. and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2024) A Socially Assistive Robot using Automated Planning in a Paediatric Clinical Setting. In: 2024 International Symposium on Technological Advances in Human-Robot Interaction, Boulder, CO, USA, 09-10 Mar 2024, pp. 47-55. ISBN 9798400716614 (doi: 10.1145/3648536.3648542)

Lindsay, Alan, Ramirez-Duque, Andres, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Petrick, Ron (2024) Maintaining, Monitoring, and Managing User Engagement in Social Robotics for Short-Term Interactions. HAXP: Human-Aware and Explainable Planning Workshop (ICAPS'24), Banff, Alberta, Canada, 03 June 2024. (Accepted for Publication)

Foster, M. E. et al. (2024) Including Front-Line Workers as Primary Stakeholders in Public-Space HRI. 1st International Workshop on WRRs - Exploring Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Robotic Futures, Boulder, CO, USA, 11 Mar 2024.

Ashkenazi, Shaul ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2705-9283, Skantze, Gabriel, Stuart-Smith, Jane ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7400-9436 and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2024) Goes to the Heart: Speaking the User’s Native Language. In: 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI), Boulder, Colorado, USA, 11-15 March 2024, pp. 214-218. ISBN 9798400703232 (doi: 10.1145/3610978.3640633)

Callander, Nicholas, Ramirez-Duque, Andres A. and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2024) Navigating the Human-Robot Interaction Landscape. Practical Guidelines for Privacy-Conscious Social Robots. In: 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2024), Boulder, Colorado, USA, 11-15 March 2024, pp. 283-287. ISBN 9798400703232 (doi: 10.1145/3610978.3640637)

Lindsay, Alan, Ramirez-Duque, Andres A., Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Petrick, Ronald P. A. (2024) Using AI Planning for Managing Affective States in Social Robotics. In: 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2024), Boulder, Colorado, USA, 11-15 March 2024, pp. 679-683. ISBN 9798400703232 (doi: 10.1145/3610978.3640744)

Ramirez-Duque, Andres A., Lindsay, Alan, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Petrick, Ron P. A. (2024) A Lightweight Artificial Cognition Model for Socio-Affective Human-Robot Interaction. In: 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI 2024), Boulder, Colorado, USA, 11-15 March 2024, pp. 929-933. ISBN 9798400703225 (doi: 10.1145/3610977.3637469)

2023

Blair, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0453-1381 and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2023) Real-World Evaluation of a University Guidance and Information Robot. In: 15th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2023), Doha, Qatar, 3-7 Dec 2023, pp. 193-203. ISBN 9789819987184 (doi: 10.1007/978-981-99-8718-4_17)

Hudson, Summer, Nishat, Fareha, Ali, Samina, Litwin, Sasha, Wiles, Brittany, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Stinson, Jennifer (2023) Qualitative Needs Assessment of Child and Caregiver Perspectives to Inform Design of an Artificial Intelligence-enhanced Social Robot to Improve Paediatric Emergency Care. 2023 Annual Conference of the Canadian Paediatric Society, Halifax, Canada, 25-27 May 2023. ISBN 1205-7088 (doi: 10.1093/pch/pxad055.077)

Hudson, Summer, Nishat, Fareha, Stinson, Jennifer, Litwin, Sasha, Zeller, Frauke, Wiles, Brittany, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Ali, Samina (2023) Perspectives of healthcare providers to inform the design of an AI-enhanced social robot in the pediatric emergency department. Children, 10(9), 1511. (doi: 10.3390/children10091511) (PMID:37761472) (PMCID:PMC10529269)

Nishat, Fareha, Hudson, Summer, Panesar, Prabdeep, Ali, Samina, Litwin, Sasha, Zeller, Frauke, Candelaria, Patricia, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Stinson, Jennifer (2023) Exploring the needs of children and caregivers to inform design of an artificial intelligence-enhanced social robot in the pediatric emergency department. Journal of Clinical and Translational Science, 7(1), e191. (doi: 10.1017/cts.2023.608) (PMID:37745926) (PMCID:PMC10514688)

Bikanga Ada, Mireilla ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5406-6935 and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2023) Enhancing postgraduate students’ technical skills: perceptions of modified team-based learning in a six-week multi-subject Bootcamp-style CS course. Computer Science Education, 33(2), pp. 186-210. (doi: 10.1080/08993408.2021.1959174)

Blair, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0453-1381 and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2023) Development of a University Guidance and Information Robot. In: 18th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI2023), Stockholm, Sweden, 13-16 March 2023, pp. 516-520. ISBN 9781450399708 (doi: 10.1145/3568294.3580138)

Foster, M. E. et al. (2023) Co-design of a Social Robot for Distraction in the Paediatric Emergency Department. In: 18th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI2023), Stockholm, Sweden, 13-16 March 2023, pp. 461-465. ISBN 9781450399708 (doi: 10.1145/3568294.3580127)

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Stuart-Smith, Jane ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7400-9436 (2023) Social Robotics Meets Sociolinguistics: Investigating Accent Bias and Social Context in HRI. In: 18th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI2023), Stockholm, Sweden, 13-16 March 2023, pp. 156-160. ISBN 9781450399708 (doi: 10.1145/3568294.3580063)

Ramírez, Andrés and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2023) A Whisper ROS Wrapper to Enable Automatic Speech Recognition in Embedded Systems. Human-Robot Conversational Interaction (HRCI), Stockholm, Sweden, 13 Mar 2023. (Accepted for Publication)

2022

Lindsay, Alan, Ramirez-Duque, Andres, Petrick, Ronald P.A. and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2022) A Socially Assistive Robot using Automated Planning in a Paediatric Clinical Setting. In: AAAI Fall Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction (AI-HRI 2022), Arlington, VA, USA, 17-19 November 2022, (doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2210.09753)

Janeczko, Zuzanna and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2022) A Study on Human Interactions With Robots Based on Their Appearance and Behaviour. In: CUI '22: Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Conversational User Interfaces, Glasgow, UK, 26-28 Jul 2022, ISBN 9781450397391 (doi: 10.1145/3543829.3544523)

2021

Tshukudu, Ethel, Cutts, Quintin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6368-9912 and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2021) Evaluating a Pedagogy for Improving Conceptual Transfer and Understanding in a Second Programming Language Learning Context. In: 21st Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research, 18-21 Nov 2021, p. 26. (doi: 10.1145/3488042.3488050)

2020

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Ali, Samina, Litwin, Sasha, Parker, Jennifer, Petrick, Ronald P. A., Smith, David Harris, Stinson, Jennifer and Zeller, Frauke (2020) Using AI-Enhanced Social Robots to Improve Children's Healthcare Experiences. In: The 12th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2020), 14-16 Nov 2020, ISBN 9783030620554

Chen, Chaona ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7289-1242, Garrod, Oliver G. B., Ince, Robin A. A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8427-0507, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Schyns, Philippe G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8542-7489 and Jack, Rachael E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3687-0799 (2020) Building culturally-valid dynamic facial expressions for a conversational virtual agent using human perception. In: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, Scotland, Virtual Event, UK, 20 - 22 October 2020, ISBN 9781450375863 (doi: 10.1145/3383652.3423913)

McConnell, Matthew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2330-9102 and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2020) Two Dimensional Sign Language Agent. In: 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA), 20-22 Oct 2020, p. 39. ISBN 9781450375863 (doi: 10.1145/3383652.3423898)

Petrick, Ronald P. A. and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2020) Knowledge engineering and planning for social human–robot interaction: a case study. In: Vallati, Mauro and Kitchin, Diane (eds.) Knowledge Engineering Tools and Techniques for AI Planning. Springer, pp. 261-277. ISBN 9783030385606 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-38561-3_14)

2019

Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Mazel, Alexandre and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2019) Contextual Non-verbal Behaviour Generation for Humanoid Robot Using Text Sentiment. 28th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2019), New Delhi, India, 14-18 Oct 2019.

Foster, M. E. et al. (2019) MuMMER: Socially Intelligent Human-Robot Interaction in Public Spaces. In: AAAI Fall Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Human-Robot Interaction for Service Robots in Human Environments, Arlington, Virginia, USA, 7-9 November 2019,

Meoni, Simon and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2019) Adapting NLG Methods to Social Robotics. 1st Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI, Florence, Italy, 01 Aug 2019.

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2019) Natural language generation for social robotics: Opportunities and challenges. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 374(1771), 20180027. (doi: 10.1098/rstb.2018.0027) (PMID:30853003) (PMCID:PMC6452247)

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2019) From clockwork automata to robot newsreaders. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1, pp. 170-171. (doi: 10.1038/s42256-019-0043-2)

Sari, Eunice, Halvey, Martin, Cockton, Gilbert and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2019) The Scottish HCI community. Interactions, 26(2), pp. 92-93. (doi: 10.1145/3308641)

2018

Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Craenen, Bart, Vinciarelli, Alessandro ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9048-0524 and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2018) Shaping Robot Gestures to Shape Users' Perception: the Effect of Amplitude and Speed on Godspeed Ratings. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI '18), Southampton, UK, 15-18 Dec 2018, pp. 293-300. ISBN 9781450359535 (doi: 10.1145/3284432.3284445)

Savcheva, Dilyana and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2018) Comparing User Responses to Limited and Flexible Interaction in a Conversational Interface. In: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI '18), Southampton, UK, 15-18 Dec 2018, pp. 368-370. ISBN 9781450359535 (doi: 10.1145/3284432.3287189)

Porayska-Pomsta, K. et al. (2018) Blending human and artificial intelligence to support autistic children’s social communication skills. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 25(6), 35. (doi: 10.1145/3271484)

Craenen, Bart, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Vinciarelli, Alessandro ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9048-0524 (2018) Do We Really Like Robots that Match our Personality? The Case of Big-Five Traits, Godspeed Scores and Robotic Gestures. In: 27th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2018), Nanjing, China, 27-31 Aug 2018, ISBN 9781538679807 (doi: 10.1109/ROMAN.2018.8525672)

Craenen, Bart, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Vinciarelli, Alessandro ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9048-0524 (2018) Shaping Gestures to Shape Personalities: The Relationship Between Gesture Parameters, Attributed Personality Traits and Godspeed Scores. In: 27th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2018), Nanjing, China, 27-31 Aug 2018, ISBN 9781538679807 (doi: 10.1109/ROMAN.2018.8525739)

Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Craenen, Bart, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Vinciarelli, Alessandro ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9048-0524 (2018) The More I Understand it, the Less I Like it: The Relationship Between Understandability and Godspeed Scores for Robotic Gestures. In: 27th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2018), Nanjing, China, 27-31 Aug 2018, ISBN 9781538679807 (doi: 10.1109/ROMAN.2018.8525585)

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2018) Natural Language Generation for Public-Space Social Robots. 4th Workshop on Public Space Human-Robot Interaction (PubRob 2018), Barcelona, Spain, 3 Sep 2018.

Iocchi, Luca, Nardi, Daniele and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2018) Evaluation of Interacting Robots in Public Spaces Through Scientific Competitions. 4th Workshop on Public Space Human-Robot Interaction (PubRob 2018), Barcelona, Spain, 3 Sep 2018.

Craenen, Bart G.W., Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Vinciarelli, Alessandro ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9048-0524 (2018) Shaping Gestures to Shape Personality: Big-Five Traits, Godspeed Scores and the Similarity-Attraction Effect. In: 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2018), Stockholm, Sweden, 10-15 Jul 2018, pp. 2221-2223.

2017

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Gaschler, Andre and Giuliani, Manuel (2017) Automatically classifying user engagement for dynamic multi-party human–robot interaction. International Journal of Social Robotics, 9(5), pp. 659-674. (doi: 10.1007/s12369-017-0414-y)

Mancini, Maurizio, Niewiadomski, Radoslaw, Hashimoto, Shuji, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Scherer, Stefan and Volpe, Gualtiero (2017) Guest editorial: towards machines able to deal with laughter. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 8(4), pp. 492-494. (doi: 10.1109/taffc.2017.2766938)

Aylett, Ruth, Broz, Frank, Ghosh, Ayan, McKenna, Peter, Rajendran, Gnanathusharan, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Roffo, Giorgio ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4170-914X and Vinciarelli, Alessandro ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9048-0524 (2017) Evaluating Robot Facial Expressions. In: 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2017), Glasgow, Scotland, 13-17 Nov 2017, pp. 516-517. ISBN 9781450355438 (doi: 10.1145/3136755.3143032)

Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Craenen, Bart, Vinciarelli, Alessandro ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9048-0524 and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2017) Modulating the Non-Verbal Social Signals of a Humanoid Robot. In: 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2017), Glasgow, Scotland, 13-17 Nov 2017, pp. 508-509. ISBN 9781450355438 (doi: 10.1145/3136755.3143028)

Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Vinciarelli, Alessandro ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9048-0524 (2017) Perceptual Control Theory for Engagement and Disengagement of Users in Public Spaces. In: 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2017), Vienna, Austria, 6-9 March 2017, pp. 105-106. ISBN 9781450348850 (doi: 10.1145/3029798.3038364)

2016

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Petrick, Ronald P.A. (2016) Separating representation, reasoning, and implementation for interaction management: Lessons from automated planning. In: Jokinen, Kristiina and Wilcock, Graham (eds.) Dialogues with Social Robots: Enablements, Analyses, and Evaluation. Series: Lecture notes in electrical engineering (427). Springer, pp. 93-107. ISBN 9789811025846

Petrick, Ronald P.A. and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2016) Using General-Purpose Planning for Action Selection in Human-Robot Interaction. In: AAAI Fall Symposium on Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction (AI-HRI 2016), Arlington, VA, USA, 17-19 Nov 2016, pp. 71-74.

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Alami, Rachid, Gestranius, Olli, Lemon, Olive, Niemelä, Marketta, Odobez, Jean-Marc and Pandey, Amit Kumar (2016) The MuMMER Project: Engaging Human-Robot Interaction in Real-World Public Spaces. In: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR 2016), Kansas City, USA, 01-03 Nov 2016, pp. 753-763. ISBN 9783319474366 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_74)

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2016) Public-space Human-robot Interaction in the MuMMER Project. The 3rd Workshop on Public Space Human-Robot Interaction (PubRob 2016), New York, NY, USA, 27 Aug 2016.

Hastie, Helen, Lim, Mei Yii, Janarthanam, Srini, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Aylett, Ruth, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Hall, Lynne (2016) I Remember You! Interaction with Memory for an Empathic Virtual Robotic Tutor. In: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2016), Singapore, 09-13 May 2016, pp. 931-939. ISBN 9781450342391

Petrick, Ronald P. A. and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2016) Action Selection for Interaction Management: Opportunities and Lessons for Automated Planning. In: 33rd Workshop of the UK Planning & Scheduling Special Interest Group (PlanSIG 2016), Glasgow, Scotland, 18-19 Feb 2016,

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Petrick, Ronald P A (2016) Separating Representation, Reasoning, and Implementation for Interaction Management. In: International Workshop on Spoken Dialogue Systems (IWSDS2016), Saariselkä, Finland, 13-16 Jan 2016,

2015

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Janarthanam, Srini, Lim, Mei Yii, Hastie, Helen and Aylett, Ruth (2015) How Does Affective Robot Feedback Influence Learner Experience in a Real-World Treasure Hunt? In: WONDER 2015: The First International Workshop on Educational Robots, Paris, France, 26 Oct 2015, (Unpublished)

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2015) Natural Face-to-Face Conversation with Socially Intelligent Robots. In: Proceedings of the IROS 2015 Workshop on Spatial Reasoning and Interaction for Real-World Robotics, Hamburg, Germany, 28 Sep - 02 Oct 2015,

Janarthanam, Srinivasan, Hastie, Helen, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Aylett, Ruth and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2015) A Reusable Interaction Management Module: Use case for Empathic Robotic Tutoring. In: SemDial 2015 - goDIAL: 19th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, Gothenburg, Sweden, 24-26 Aug 2015, pp. 189-190.

Deshmukh, A. et al. (2015) An Empathic Robotic Tutor in a Map Application. In: 14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent System (AAMAS '15), Istanbul, Turkey, 04-08 May 2015, pp. 1923-1924. ISBN 9781450334136

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Janarthanam, Srinivasan, Lim, Mei Yii, Hastie, Helen and Aylett, Ruth (2015) Influencing the Learning Experience Through Affective Agent Feedback in a Real-World Treasure Hunt. In: 14th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent System (AAMAS '15), Istanbul, Turkey, 04-08 May 2015, pp. 1711-1712. ISBN 9781450334136

Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Jones, Aidan, Janarthanam, Srinivasan, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Ribeiro, Tiago, Corrigan, Lee Joseph, Aylett, Ruth, Paiva, Ana, Papadopoulos, Fotios and Castellano, Ginevra (2015) Empathic Robot Tutors - Map Guide. In: Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction Extended Abstracts (HRI'15), Portland, OR, USA, 02-05 Mar 2015, p. 311. ISBN 9781450333184 (doi: 10.1145/2701973.2702693)

Ribeiro, T. et al. (2015) The Empathic Robotic Tutor, featuring the NAO robot. Proceedings of the 10th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2015), Video Session, Portland, OR, USA, 02-05 Mar 2015. ISBN 9781450333184 (doi: 10.1145/2701973.2702100)

2014

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Lim, Mei Yii, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Janarthanam, Srinivasan, Hastie, Helen and Aylett, Ruth (2014) Affective Feedback for a Virtual Robot in a Real-World Treasure Hunt. Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Multimodal, Multi-Party, Real-World Human-Robot Interaction (MMRWHRI '14), Istanbul, Turkey, 16 Nov 2014. ISBN 9781450305518 (doi: 10.1145/2666499.2669641)

Keizer, Simon, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Wang, Zhuoran and Lemon, Oliver (2014) Machine learning for social multiparty human-robot interaction. ACM Transactions on Intelligent Interactive Systems, 4(3), 14. (doi: 10.1145/2600021)

Lim, Mei Yii, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Janarthanam, Srinivasan, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Hastie, Helen and Aylett, Ruth (2014) Studying the Effects of Affective Feedback in Embodied Tutors. In: Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue (DialWatt), Edinburgh, Scotland, 01-03 Sep 2014, pp. 217-219.

Keizer, Simon, Kastoris, Pantelis, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621 and Lemon, Oliver (2014) Evaluating a Social Multi-user Interaction Model Using a Nao Robot. In: The 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (2014 RO-MAN), Edinburgh, UK, 25-29 Aug 2014, pp. 318-322. ISBN 9781479967650 (doi: 10.1109/ROMAN.2014.6926272)

Lim, Mei Yii, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Janarthanam, Srinivasan, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Hastie, Helen and Aylett, Ruth (2014) Let's Go for a Treasure Hunt. Proceedings of the Affective Agents Workshop (AAW) at IVA 2014, Boston, MA, USA, 27-29 Aug 2014. pp. 1-8.

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Petrick, Ronald P.A. (2014) Planning for Social Interaction with Sensor Uncertainty. Proceedings of the ICAPS 2014 Scheduling and Planning Applications woRKshop (SPARK), Portsmouth, NH, USA, 21-26 Jun 2014.

Bard, Ellen Gurman, Hill, Robin L., Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Arai, Manabu (2014) Tuning accessibility of referring expressions in situated dialogue. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(8), pp. 928-949. (doi: 10.1080/23273798.2014.895845)

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2014) Validating Attention Classifiers for Multi-Party Human-Robot Interaction. Proceedings of the HRI 2014 Workshop on Attention Models in Robotics, Bielefeld, Germany, 03 Mar 2014.

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Keizer, Simon and Lemon, Oliver (2014) Towards Action Selection Under Uncertainty for a Socially Aware Robot Bartender. Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '14), Bielefeld, Germany, 03-06 Mar 2014. ISBN 9781450326582 (doi: 10.1145/2559636.2559805)

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2014) Representing Uncertainty for Dynamic Multi-Party Social Human-Robot Interaction. 31st Workshop of the UK Planning & Scheduling Special Interest Group (PlanSIG 2013), Edinburgh, Scotland, 29-30 Jan 2014.

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Giuliani, Manuel and Isard, Amy (2014) Task-based evaluation of context-sensitive referring expressions in human-robot dialogue. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29(8), pp. 1018-1034. (doi: 10.1080/01690965.2013.855802)

Keizer, Simon, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Gaschler, Andre, Giuliani, Manuel, Isard, Amy and Lemon, Oliver (2014) Handling Uncertain Input in Multi-user Human-robot Interaction. In: The 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (2014 RO-MAN), Edinburgh, UK, 25-29 Aug 2014, pp. 312-317. ISBN 9781479967650 (doi: 10.1109/ROMAN.2014.6926271)

2013

Keizer, Simon, Kastoris, Pantelis, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621 and Lemon, Oliver (2013) User Evaluation of a Multi-user Social Interaction Model Implemented on a Nao Robot. ICSR 2013 Workshop on Robots in Public Spaces, Bristol, UK, 27 Oct 2013. (Unpublished)

This list was generated on Sun Jun 15 04:27:40 2025 BST.

Jump to: Articles | Book Sections | Conference or Workshop Item | Conference Proceedings

Number of items: 79.

Articles

Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2019) From clockwork automata to robot newsreaders. Nature Machine Intelligence, 1, pp. 170-171. (doi: 10.1038/s42256-019-0043-2)

Book Sections

Conference or Workshop Item

Lim, Mei Yii, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Janarthanam, Srinivasan, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Hastie, Helen and Aylett, Ruth (2014) Let's Go for a Treasure Hunt. Proceedings of the Affective Agents Workshop (AAW) at IVA 2014, Boston, MA, USA, 27-29 Aug 2014. pp. 1-8.

Keizer, Simon, Kastoris, Pantelis, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621 and Lemon, Oliver (2013) User Evaluation of a Multi-user Social Interaction Model Implemented on a Nao Robot. ICSR 2013 Workshop on Robots in Public Spaces, Bristol, UK, 27 Oct 2013. (Unpublished)

Conference Proceedings

Craenen, Bart, Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 and Vinciarelli, Alessandro ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9048-0524 (2018) Shaping Gestures to Shape Personalities: The Relationship Between Gesture Parameters, Attributed Personality Traits and Godspeed Scores. In: 27th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2018), Nanjing, China, 27-31 Aug 2018, ISBN 9781538679807 (doi: 10.1109/ROMAN.2018.8525739)

Deshmukh, Amol ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4942-3621, Craenen, Bart, Vinciarelli, Alessandro ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9048-0524 and Foster, Mary Ellen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1228-7657 (2017) Modulating the Non-Verbal Social Signals of a Humanoid Robot. In: 19th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2017), Glasgow, Scotland, 13-17 Nov 2017, pp. 508-509. ISBN 9781450355438 (doi: 10.1145/3136755.3143028)

This list was generated on Sun Jun 15 04:27:40 2025 BST.

Grants

Using AI-Enhanced Social Robots to Improve Children's Healthcare Experiences
ESRC/SSHRC, UK-Canada Artificial Intelligence Initiative
Coordinator
2020 -- 2024
MuMMER: MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot
European Commission, Horizon 2020
Coordinator
2016 -- 2020
A Robot Training Buddy for adults with ASD
EPSRC Standard Grant
Co-Investigator
2016 -- 2020

Supervision

Ashkenazi, Shaul
Evaluating and Enhancing Human-Robot Interaction for Multiple Diverse Users in Real-World Contexts
Blair, Andrew
Embracing Industry 5.0: Participatory Design and Integration of Social Public-Space Robots
Voges, Amelie
You Never get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression - Establishing how best to align human expectations about a robot’s performance based on the robot’s appearance and behaviour
Yu, Wanshu
Designing, implementing, and evaluating an intelligent conversational agent for facilitating peer support

Teaching

Undergraduate

Postgraduate

Programming and Systems Development

Other Roles

Director of Learning and Teaching (2021-present)

Research datasets

Jump to: 2021

Number of items: 1.

2021

Yadav, S. and Foster, M. E. (2021) GISE-51. [Data Collection]

This list was generated on Sun Jun 15 09:00:00 2025 BST.

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Clarity

Dr Mary Ellen Foster

Biography

Research interests

Publications

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

Articles

Book Sections

Conference or Workshop Item

Conference Proceedings

Grants

Supervision

Teaching

Undergraduate

Postgraduate

Other Roles

Research datasets

2021