I am a tenure-track assistant professor at Linköping University and a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. I lead the Autonomous Systems and Robotics in Society research group.
I study how people interact with robots in everyday life. Methodologically, I use video recordings and multimodal transcription to document and analyse how people make sense of robots in naturally organised interaction. Combining insights about the organisation of human social interaction with interaction design, I also use video material to explore how robots could be designed in human-centered ways.
Currently, I am interested in how people make sense of robots in public settings. Following mobile robots through city streets, my research contributes an understanding of the encounters that robots have with the people who are present in these spaces. Apart from city streets, I have also done video-ethnographic studies of robots in family homes and surgical operating rooms.
I co-founded the Ethnomethodology & Conversation Analysis Artificial Intelligence research network (EMCAI) and am an associate editor for the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction journal.
About me
Dr. Hannah Pelikan is a tenure-track assistant professor in language, culture and interaction 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 Prof. 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).
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). Prior to her current position, she 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 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.
Hannah Pelikan 