Elena Irimia

Artificial Intelligence in Medicine (Canada), Academia Oamenilor de Știință din România

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About

Elena Irimia is a leading researcher in human-robot interaction and natural language processing, with a particular focus on enabling conversational AI for the Romanian language. Her major contributions center on the ROBIN project, where she spearheaded the development of language resources, software, and dialog systems that allow the Pepper robot to understand and respond in Romanian. Irimia’s work bridges critical gaps in multilingual robotics, creating a dialog manager designed for real-world micro-world scenarios that integrates real-time automatic speech recognition and synthesis. Her research has garnered attention, with her most-cited paper on making Pepper interact in Romanian receiving 5 citations, while her dialog manager work has earned 4 citations—foundational numbers that reflect the niche but vital nature of her contributions. Notably, her achievements include overcoming the strict requirements of deploying AI in physical robots, advancing the field of Romanian-language human-robot interaction. Irimia’s efforts are pivotal for students and researchers interested in expanding conversational AI to underrepresented languages, demonstrating how targeted resource creation can empower robots to engage naturally with diverse users.