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About

Catherine Tessier is a leading researcher at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, and ethics. Her work centers on human-robot interaction, particularly the critical challenges of authority management, autonomous decision-making, and ethical conflicts in robotic systems. She has made foundational contributions to understanding how humans and robots can collaborate effectively, developing formal models—such as Petri Net-based frameworks—for team monitoring and mission-aware adaptive communication. Tessier’s research on “attentional tunnelling” in robot supervision, using ocular metrics to detect operator cognitive states, demonstrates her commitment to safety and human factors. She is perhaps best known for her leadership in ethics, serving on CERNA (the French Commission for the Ethics of Research in Information Sciences and Technologies), where she co-authored influential recommendations on ethics in robotics research (cited over 30 times). Her work on authority conflict detection and resolution in human-robot systems, along with experimental protocols for moral decision-making, has shaped how researchers approach the design of responsible autonomous agents. With a career spanning multi-agent satellite constellations to ethical AI, Tessier’s impact is felt across engineering, cognitive science, and philosophy of technology.