Katrin S. LohanAssistant Professor

My main research interests are Human-Robot Interaction in more detail I am focussing on teachable robots, social, developmental and cognitive robotics. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of these fields, under the umbrella of cognitive science, my research intersects with linguistics, psychology, neuroscience and biology. I joint Heriot-Watt University in 2013 and sice 2014 I am deputy director of the Robotics Lab. Before I joined Heriot-Watt University (HWU) I was a Marie Curie Experienced researcher, at iCub Facility, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and a RobotDoc project fellow. My work in this project was focused on improving the attention system of the iCub robot towards a more child-like one. Hence, to improve the interactive capabilities of the robot, i.e., by a keyword spotting system that does not require a predefined lexicon. I optained my PHD on “A model of contingency detection to spot tutoring behaviour and respond to ostensive cues in HRI” in 2012, at University of Bielefeld. Furthermore, I was a research fellow in the ITALK project with the University of Bielefeld.