Neeraj Cherakara

Papers

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About

Neeraj Cherakara is a researcher at the forefront of human-robot interaction, specializing in multi-party conversational systems, social robotics, and large language model (LLM) integration. Their major contributions lie in designing embodied conversational agents capable of engaging in natural, multi-party dialogues—a significant leap from traditional one-on-one human-robot interactions. Cherakara’s most cited work, "A Multi-party Conversational Social Robot Using LLMs" (2024, 22 citations), introduces a pioneering architecture that enables a social robot to hold fluid conversations with multiple humans simultaneously, with each component detailed in real-time video demonstrations. This work has been applied in real-world healthcare settings, as shown in their 2024 paper (12 citations) on multi-party multimodal conversations between patients, companions, and a social robot in a hospital memory clinic—demonstrating the practical impact of their research in sensitive environments. Additionally, their 2023 work "FurChat" (4 citations) showcases an embodied agent that blends open and closed-domain dialogue with expressive facial animations, deployed on a Furhat robot. Cherakara’s research is instrumental in advancing socially aware AI, with direct implications for assistive robotics and patient care.