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About

Lucrezia Grassi is a researcher specializing in human-robot interaction, conversational AI, and socially assistive robotics, with a particular focus on making autonomous agents more culturally aware, inclusive, and socially intelligent. Her work bridges knowledge representation, natural language processing, and social robotics to create systems capable of engaging in meaningful, context-sensitive dialogue with diverse human populations. Among her most significant contributions is a knowledge-grounded dialogue management framework — her most cited work with 31 citations — which leverages ontological structures to enable robots and conversational agents to navigate complex, topic-rich interactions. She has also pioneered cloud-based architectures for culturally competent interaction, particularly targeting older adults and underserved populations. Her concept of "diversity-aware" robotics, explored across multiple papers, advances the field by enabling robots to adapt their communication style based on individual factors such as age, culture, gender, and disability — most notably demonstrated in research with spinal cord injury patients. Grassi's work on group conversation dynamics, emergency crowdsourcing frameworks, and LLM-enhanced human-robot interaction further demonstrates her broad interdisciplinary reach. With over 110 cumulative citations across recent publications, her research is shaping the future of empathetic, adaptive, and socially responsible human-robot communication.