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About

Petra Wagner is a leading researcher at the intersection of speech synthesis, human-robot interaction, and explainable artificial intelligence. Her work fundamentally rethinks how robots and intelligent environments communicate with people, moving beyond rigid commands toward adaptive, socially-aware interaction. Wagner’s most influential studies, including her work on multimodal corpora for smart homes (29 citations) and how naive users intuitively address robotic apartments (28 citations), have shaped our understanding of natural human-robot dialogue. She pioneered the use of prominence detection for acoustic feedback in tutoring scenarios, and her critical meta-analysis of speech synthesis evaluation (8 citations) called for a “social turn” in assessment methods, arguing that laboratory tests fail to capture real-world communicative success. Wagner also developed the first implementation of a hesitating robot that dynamically adjusts its disfluencies based on human attention, and she contributed to co-constructive explainable systems, where robots and humans collaboratively build explanations. Her work on adaptive speech synthesis for cognitive robotic service apartments and audio-visual synthesized attitudes using the German-speaking robot SMiRAE further demonstrates her commitment to creating robots that are not just functional, but genuinely communicative partners. With over 90 citations across her most-cited papers, Wagner’s research is essential reading for anyone interested in building robots that speak, listen, and explain like social beings.