I am a tenure-track assistant professor at Linköping University and a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, researching robots in society.

Currently, I am studying how people make sense of robots in public – for instance when encountering them on the sidewalk or when working behind the scenes to make robots move among people.

My work is located at the intersection of ethnomethodology & conversation analysis (EMCA) and human-robot interaction (HRI). I combine insights from human social interaction and interaction design, typically working with video recordings. I use video to document how humans make sense of robots in everyday interaction and as a design material to explore how robots could be designed in human-centered ways.

About me

Dr. Hannah Pelikan is a tenure-track assistant professor at the Department for Culture and Society at Linköping University and a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, funded by the Swedish Central Bank’s Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. Together with Dr. Airi Lampinen, Prof. Madeline Balaam and Dr. Katie Winkle, she leads the “Autonomous Systems and Robotics in Society” research group, funded by the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanity and Society (WASP-HS).

Prior to her current position, Dr. Pelikan was a WASP-HS postdoctoral fellow working in the AI in Motion project led by Prof. Barry Brown (Stockholm University/University of Copenhagen) and Prof. Mathias Broth (Linköping University). Dr. Pelikan has an interdisciplinary background, combining a PhD in language and culture from Linköping University (Sweden), a cum laude Engineering degree in Interaction Technology from University of Twente (The Netherlands), and a Bachelor of Science in Cognitive Science from University of Osnabrück (Germany). She has been affiliated with the Department of Information Science at Cornell University (USA) through multiple research visits. During her postdoc, she was a visiting researcher at the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham (UK).

Hannah publishes at top-tier interdisciplinary venues such as ACM CHI, ACM/IEEE HRI and ACM CSCW. Her work was honoured with best paper awards at HRI and at CSCW, and she was selected as an HRI Pioneer in 2023. Hannah is regularly invited as a speaker, among others at the HRI Laboratory at the University of Kyoto (Japan), at the Robotics Department at University of Michigan (USA) and at the Centre for Robotics at Queensland University of Technology (Australia). She has presented at national and international science events such as Forskarfredag and Pint of Science and her work has been covered among others by the Swedish Radio P1.