Furhat Social Robot

Embodied conversational AI for affective and persuasive human–AI interaction

Furhat Social Robot

Furhat is used as an embodied conversational agent to investigate affective and persuasive human–AI interaction.

Our research examines how facial expressions, gaze, head movement, voice, dialogue strategies, and other nonverbal behaviors influence human perception, trust, engagement, and behavior change.

One study used Furhat to investigate how Japanese middle school students responded to deceptive statements generated by an AI-powered robot.

Research Topics

  • Emotion-aware conversational agents
  • Persuasive dialogue and behavior change
  • Adaptive nonverbal behavior
  • Human–AI trust
  • Social presence and embodiment
  • Cross-cultural human–agent interaction

Representative Publications

  • Ahmed Salem and Kaoru Sumi. “Deception Detection in Educational AI: Challenges for Japanese Middle School Students in Interacting with Generative AI Robots.” Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 7, 2024.
    DOI: 10.3389/frai.2024.1493348

  • Ahmed Salem and Kaoru Sumi. “A Comparative Human–Robot Interaction Study between Face-Display and an Advanced Social Robot.” Proceedings of IEEE COMPSAC 2024, pp. 628–633, 2024.

  • Ahmed Salem and Kaoru Sumi. “Retro-Projected Virtual Agent: A Simple yet Advanced Social Robot.” Theory and Practice of Computation, 2024.
    DOI: 10.2991/978-94-6463-388-7_7