Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Zerrin Yumak is a leading researcher in multimodal, multi-party social interaction, focusing on how virtual characters and social robots can seamlessly engage with humans. Her work bridges artificial intelligence, computer graphics, and human-robot interaction to create autonomous agents that perceive, understand, and respond to human behavior in group settings. Her most cited paper, "Modelling Multi-Party Interactions among Virtual Characters, Robots, and Humans" (23 citations), introduces frameworks for telepresence where 3D avatars and humanoid robots are driven by remote users to enhance co-presence. She further advances this with "Tracking and fusion for multiparty interaction with a virtual character and a social robot" (15 citations), developing sensor fusion techniques that enable artificial characters to infer user states and respond multimodally. Yumak’s contributions include body movement generation for expressive agents and autonomous telepresence systems that operate even when real users are absent. Her work has been published in top venues like the International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents and the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces. With over 60 total citations, Yumak is shaping the future of socially aware robots and virtual humans, making them more natural, responsive, and capable of navigating complex, multi-party interactions.