Emilia Barakova is an Associate Professor in Social Robots and Embodied Intelligent Agents. Emilia Barakova received her Ph.D. in Mathematics and Natural Sciences from the University of Groningen in 1999, and her master’s degree in Electronics and Automation engineering from the Technical University of Sofia in Bulgaria. She is presently affiliated with the Industrial Design department and serves as the Head of the Social Robotics Lab at the Eindhoven University of Technology and leads the  Transdisciplinary Research & Design research cluster. She formerly worked at Riken Brain Science Institute, Wako-shi, Japan, the German-Japanese Robotics Research Lab, Kitakyushu, Japan, the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, and the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

Barakova specializes in embodied social interaction with and through technology and social and cognitive robotics.  She has expertise in modelling social behaviour by merging artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences, and robotics. Her present research focuses on the use of social robots for enhancing the well-being of people with visual impairments and intellectual disabilities, dementia, and also education and special education (i.e. social skills training of children with autism spectrum disorders. Barakova has served as the program and general chair for several conferences (including IJSR, IEEE RO-MAN, and IEEE Hybrid Intelligent Systems), and she is an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Social Robotics,  Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, Interaction Studies, and Transactions of Human-Machine Systems. 

After obtaining a Master diploma from Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria, Emilia Barakova worked as a researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Science before going on to do her PhD research into artificial intelligence at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Since then, she has held several research positions at GMD-Japan Research lan  and RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan. She returned to the Netherlands in 2006, taking up a position at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), as Assistant Professor. She has made her interest in social robots into a cornerstone of her research at TU/e.

• RIKEN BSI