Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Selma Yilmazyildiz is a pioneering researcher at the intersection of affective computing and social human-robot interaction (HRI), whose work has fundamentally shaped how robots communicate emotion and intent. Her key research areas include semantic-free utterances (SFUs), emotional gibberish speech synthesis, and child-robot interaction. Yilmazyildiz’s most impactful contribution is her comprehensive review of SFUs in social HRI (91 citations), which established the theoretical foundation for using non-linguistic vocalizations—such as sighs, laughs, and gibberish—as a universal auditory interface for machines. She further advanced the field by designing the huggable robot Probo (84 citations), a social robot intended for pediatric hospital settings that uses expressive speech and facial animations to engage children. Her development of the EMOGIB emotional gibberish speech database provided a critical resource for training affective speech recognition and synthesis systems. Yilmazyildiz’s work on expressive speech recognition and synthesis as enabling technologies for robot-child communication has been instrumental in creating robots that can naturally interact with young users. Her recent research on facial emotion recognition for imitation in HRI continues to push boundaries, demonstrating her sustained commitment to making robots more emotionally intelligent and socially capable.