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About

Ioana Vasilescu is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of human-robot interaction, conversational AI, and psycholinguistics. Her work explores how humans adapt their speech when communicating with machines, and how robots can be designed to influence human behavior through subtle verbal cues. In her highly cited 2020 study, "Nudges with Conversational Agents and Social Robots," she conducted one of the first experiments using conversational agents to deliver nudges—indirect suggestions that shape decision-making—to children in a primary school setting. This foundational work, along with its companion paper on children as candidates for verbal nudging, has garnered over 20 citations and lays the groundwork for automatic dialog systems capable of ethical persuasion. Vasilescu has also made significant contributions to understanding robot-directed speech, demonstrating through phonetic analysis that French speakers systematically alter their pitch, speech rate, and fluency when addressing robots versus humans, with these changes modulated by the robot’s human-likeness. Her research has direct implications for designing more natural and effective human-machine interfaces, and she is recognized as a leading voice in the emerging field of socially aware conversational robotics.