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About

Patrick G. T. Healey is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of human-computer interaction, conversation analysis, and social robotics. His work fundamentally explores how miscommunication and repair mechanisms shape human dialogue, and how these insights can be applied to design more socially adept robots. Healey’s major contributions include demonstrating that specific hand motion patterns correlate with conversational miscommunications, and that speakers physically raise their hands and heads during self-repairs—revealing the embodied nature of error correction. His research on “graceful failure” in social robots, such as the provocative question “Should Robots Blush?”, has influenced how roboticists approach breakdowns in human-robot interaction. Healey’s most cited work, the “Robot Comedy Lab” (55 citations), uses live performance as a naturalistic testbed to study the subtle social dynamics of timing, gaze, and gesture, showing how robots can be used to experimentally probe the foundations of human social coordination. With additional influential papers on troubleshooting in conversation and workshops bridging roboticists and dialogue researchers, Healey’s work has shaped both theoretical understanding of communication and practical design guidelines for more responsive, socially intelligent machines.