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About

Jesin James is a leading researcher at the intersection of artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, and affective computing, with a specialized focus on empathetic speech synthesis for social and healthcare robots. Her work addresses a critical challenge in robotics: how to make machines not just understand, but appropriately express and perceive human emotions through speech. James’s most influential contribution is the development of artificial empathy in social robots, demonstrated through her highly cited 2018 study (53 citations) that analyzed emotional speech perception in human-robot interaction. She further advanced the field by creating an open-source emotional speech corpus (38 citations) specifically designed for New Zealand English, ensuring balanced vowel distribution for robust research applications. Her 2020 work on empathetic speech synthesis for healthcare robots (40 citations) has direct implications for improving patient care through more natural robot communication. James has also explored the nuanced interplay between prosodic features and semantics in secondary emotion production, and applied her expertise to socially impactful engineering solutions, including an intelligent track cleaning robot. With over 146 total citations, James is shaping how robots can engage with humans on a deeper, more empathetic level.