Robohub.org
ep.

158

podcast
 

A Code of Ethics for HRI Practitioners with Laurel Riek


by
14 June 2014



share this:



Human-robot interaction is a fascinating field of research in robotics. It also happens to be the field that is closely related to many of the ethical concerns raised with regards to interactive robots. Should human-robot interaction (HRI) practitioners keep in mind things such as human dignity, psychological harm, and privacy? What about how robot design relates to racism and sexism?

Dr. Laurel D. Riek worked on a code of ethics for HRI practitioners with Dr. Don Howard, both professors at the University of Notre Dame. They presented their work at the We Robot conference held earlier this year.

Curious to find out more, AJung spoke with Dr. Riek about what motivated them to draft the code of ethics, what is covered, and where they plan to take it. 

Laurel Riek

lr-webLaurel Riek is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, where she directs the Robotics, Health, and Communication Lab. Her research interests are in human-robot interaction, social signal processing, and health informatics. Riek’s work explores how to build machines that are socially agile – able to sense, respond, and adapt to human behavior. This includes computationally modeling social context and synchrony, as well as building expressive robots, such as next generation patient simulator systems. Riek received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge and BS in Logic and Computation from Carnegie Mellon University. She worked for eight years as a Senior Artificial Intelligence Engineer and Roboticist at MITRE, on projects including search and rescue robotics, unmanned vehicles, and natural language processing. For her research, she has received several high-level awards from MITRE, a Qualcomm Research Award in Computing, and the NSF CAREER Award.

Links:



tags: , ,


AJung Moon HRI researcher at McGill and publicity co-chair for the ICRA 2022 conference
AJung Moon HRI researcher at McGill and publicity co-chair for the ICRA 2022 conference





Related posts :



Robot Talk Episode 136 – Making driverless vehicles smarter, with Shimon Whiteson

  05 Dec 2025
In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Shimon Whiteson from Waymo about machine learning for autonomous vehicles.

Why companies don’t share AV crash data – and how they could

  01 Dec 2025
Researchers have created a roadmap outlining the barriers and opportunities to encourage AV companies to share the data to make AVs safer.

Robot Talk Episode 135 – Robot anatomy and design, with Chapa Sirithunge

  28 Nov 2025
In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Chapa Sirithunge from University of Cambridge about what robots can teach us about human anatomy, and vice versa.

Learning robust controllers that work across many partially observable environments

  27 Nov 2025
Exploring designing controllers that perform reliably even when the environment may not be precisely known.

Human-robot interaction design retreat

  25 Nov 2025
Find out more about an event exploring design for human-robot interaction.

Robot Talk Episode 134 – Robotics as a hobby, with Kevin McAleer

  21 Nov 2025
In the latest episode of the Robot Talk podcast, Claire chatted to Kevin McAleer from kevsrobots about how to get started building robots at home.

ACM SIGAI Autonomous Agents Award 2026 open for nominations

  19 Nov 2025
Nominations are solicited for the 2026 ACM SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award.



 

Robohub is supported by:




Would you like to learn how to tell impactful stories about your robot or AI system?


scicomm
training the next generation of science communicators in robotics & AI


 












©2025.05 - Association for the Understanding of Artificial Intelligence