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About

Tevfik Metin Sezgin is a leading researcher in human-robot interaction (HRI), specializing in physical cooperation, social engagement, and non-verbal communication. His foundational work, "The role of roles: Physical cooperation between humans and robots" (2012, 281 citations), explores how robots can collaborate physically with humans by understanding haptic interaction patterns, a key contribution to dyadic joint object manipulation. He further advanced this area with "Recognition of Haptic Interaction Patterns in Dyadic Joint Object Manipulation" (2014, 53 citations), which decodes human intent through touch. In social HRI, Sezgin pioneered humorous interactions with the Joker project (2015, 36 citations), collecting multimodal data on laughter as a social marker. His more recent work, "Training Socially Engaging Robots: Modeling Backchannel Behaviors with Batch Reinforcement Learning" (2022, 16 citations), uses reinforcement learning to generate nods and smiles, enhancing robot naturalness. He also contributed the eHRI database (2023), a multimodal resource for studying engagement, and identified communicative cues for reach-to-grasp motions (2018). With over 390 citations across his top papers, Sezgin’s research bridges physical and social HRI, making robots more intuitive and engaging partners.