Abir Karami

About

Abir Karami is a researcher specializing in human-robot interaction, adaptive robotic behavior, and autonomous decision-making systems. Her work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and robotics, with a particular focus on enabling robots to collaborate meaningfully with humans in shared environments. Karami's most influential contribution, "Adaptive Artificial Companions Learning from Users' Feedback" (2016, 29 citations), emerged from the FUI-RoboPopuli project and tackled a critical limitation in companion robotics: the tendency of intelligent systems to remain user-independent. By developing frameworks that allow robots to personalize their behavior through real interaction data, she helped shift the field toward genuinely adaptive social robots. Her early foundational work on Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes for human-robot collaboration (2009, 25 citations) established a rigorous probabilistic framework for robots operating under uncertainty alongside human partners — without requiring explicit shared plans. Across her body of work, Karami has consistently addressed how robots can infer human preferences, adapt their interaction strategies, and coordinate effectively in smart spaces. Her research on multi-robot assistance deployment (2018) further extends these principles to complex, real-world environments. With nearly 100 cumulative citations, her contributions have meaningfully advanced the development of socially intelligent, personalized robotic companions.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   Adaptive artificial companions learning from users’ feedback

   29 citations · 2016
2. 2
   Partially Observable Markov Decision Process for Managing Robot Collaboration with Human

   25 citations · 2009
3. 3
   A Decision Model of Adaptive Interaction Selection for a Robot Companion

   10 citations · 2011
4. 4
   A Model for Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Collaboration

   9 citations · 2010
5. 5
   Adaptive and Personalised Robots - Learning from Users' Feedback

   8 citations · 2013
6. 6
   System Design for Coordinated Multi-robot Assistance Deployment in Smart Spaces

   7 citations · 2018
7. 7
   Human-robot collaboration for a shared mission

   5 citations · 2010
8. 8
   Towards Robots-Assisted Ambient Intelligence

   3 citations · 2018
9. 9
   Towards adaptive robots based on interaction traces: A user study

   2 citations · 2013

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links