Qiaoqiao Ren

Papers

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About

Qiaoqiao Ren is an emerging researcher working at the intersection of human-robot interaction, affective computing, and multimodal communication. Their work addresses some of the most nuanced challenges in creating robots that can meaningfully engage with humans across diverse contexts and populations. Ren's most notable contribution examines the longstanding challenge of child speech recognition in human-robot interaction — a problem that has persistently lagged behind adult speech systems due to acoustic variability in children's voices. This 2025 work, already accumulating citations shortly after publication, interrogates whether the field has truly reached a resolution to this complex problem. Complementing this, Ren's research on situated haptic interaction breaks new ground by exploring how robotic touch is affectively perceived not in isolation, but as a contextually embedded, co-constructed experience — challenging dominant frameworks in affective computing that often treat emotion recognition as a purely computational task. Together, these contributions position Ren as a thoughtful voice advocating for more embodied, context-sensitive approaches to robot-human communication. Though early in their publishing trajectory, the interdisciplinary scope of Ren's research — spanning speech technology, touch perception, and emotional interaction — signals a promising and distinctive research identity in the human-robot interaction community.