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 co-founded the Ethnomethodology & Conversation Analysis Artificial Intelligence research network (EMCAI) and am currently an associate editor for the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction journal.

I study how people interact with robots in everyday life. My research is mostly video-ethnographic, meaning that to understand how people relate to robots, I observe naturally occurring encounters with robots “in the wild” using video cameras to capture interactions for later analysis. Following conventions established in multimodal conversation analysis, I then transcribe what people (and robots) say and do in these recordings, paying specific attention to timing, prosody and the interplay of verbal and embodied resources. Working in the tradition of ethnomethodology, I am interested in the intricate ways in which people demonstrate their understanding of each other and technology through their actions.

Analysing what people actually do helps us disentangle the differences between human and artificial intelligence in an empirical way, by providing a deeper understanding of how social interaction is organised. Combining interaction analysis with interaction design, I also explore how robots could be designed in human-centered ways. Key elements in my design work are a firm grounding in practical challenges identified through observations of real interactions, and the use of video recordings as a design material.

Currently, I am interested in how people make sense of robots in public settings. My research contributes an understanding of the types of encounters that people have with autonomous systems in public spaces. Video-recorded scenarios we document on the street form the basis for interaction design and for evidence-based policy making, informing regulations and standards for public mobile robots.