Cyril Hasson

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Equipes Traitement de l'Information et Systèmes

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Cyril Hasson is a pioneering researcher in developmental robotics and affective computing, whose work explores how emotional mechanisms can enable more intuitive, autonomous robot learning. His research centers on three interconnected areas: emotional interaction for robot learning, motivational regulation through frustration, and path integration for visual navigation. Hasson’s most notable contribution is demonstrating how robots can learn from non-experts through emotional interactions inspired by social referencing—the human ability to use others’ emotional cues to guide behavior. His 2010 study on this topic (4 citations) showed that coupling a robotic head with an emotional system could make robot training accessible without specialized programming knowledge. He further advanced autonomous robotics by modeling frustration as a generic regulatory mechanism (3 citations), allowing robots to self-regulate when facing persistent failures by monitoring goal-proximity. His doctoral thesis (2011, 3 citations) synthesized these contributions by modeling low-level emotional mechanisms based on neurobiological data, creating an emotional model coherent with brain structures involved in emotion. While his citation counts are modest, Hasson’s work represents an important early step toward emotionally intelligent robots that can learn naturally from human interaction, laying groundwork for more accessible human-robot collaboration.