Harumi Kobayashi
Papers
8
Total Citations
29
H-Index
3
About
Harumi Kobayashi’s research lies at the intersection of human-robot collaboration, cognitive science, and pragmatics, with a focus on how people coordinate through language and action in cooperative tasks. Her work systematically unpacks the dynamics of multi-operator systems, quantifying role sharing and social cooperation to improve assistive robots and human-machine interfaces. Notably, her most-cited paper (2009, 9 citations) introduces a quantification method for role sharing in cooperative work, revealing how three key indexes relate to task performance—a foundational insight for designing systems that support multiple operators rather than just one. Kobayashi also explores how speech evolves during collaborative tasks, showing that human language changes in virtual environments and that utterance timing is critical for natural robot motion planning. Her investigations into pragmatic interpretation, including how children and adults infer meaning from quantifiers like “little” and “much,” extend to human-robot interaction, probing whether robots are perceived as human-like agents or mere tools. With a career spanning over a decade, Kobayashi’s contributions bridge engineering and cognitive science, offering practical frameworks for building more adaptive, communicative robots that truly understand human collaboration.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Role sharing analysis on multi-operator cooperative work9 citations · 2009
- 2Language Use in Joint Action: The Means of Referring Expressions4 citations · 2018
- 3Human speech ontology changes in virtual collaborative work4 citations · 2011
- 4
- 5Social cooperation analysis for multi-user cooperative tasks3 citations · 2010
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- 7Influence of 10 seconds' interval in pragmatic interpretation2 citations · 2010
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