Thesis Statement Essay

Research Statement

Research background

I completed my doctoral research in an industrial doctorate framework and I was affiliated with a residential care facility for individuals with Intellectual Disability (ID) having 60+ patients. Over the last three years of my doctoral research, I have been working on

extending the benefits of Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) to individuals with wide range of mental health concerns and emotion recognition via Electrodermal-Activity (EDA) physiological signal with a keen focus on real-time applications.

Robot-assisted systems for cognitive rehabilitation can increase the reach of potential benefits of evidence-based psychological/psychosocial interventions to the individuals with a wide range of mental

I created first-ever annotated multimodal database of individuals with ID named MuDERI and is now publicly available. Further, I developed an efficient wavelet-based method for artifacts attenuation while minimizing distortions to denoise the EDA signal during online processing. At the end of my thesis, I systematically analyzed the significance and the suitability of different EDA feature types across time, frequency and time-frequency domains. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) and related statistical features were explored for the first time for the emotion recognition from EDA signals and they outperformed all other feature types, including the most commonly used Skin Conductance Response (SCR) related

My research interest lies in the intersection of Human-Robot Interaction, Machine Learning and Psychology, Computer Science and Psychology. Thanks to the undertaken industrial doctorate training, I have been uniquely prepared to create the value for my research. I like to do the research in close collaboration with the end users. During my doctoral research, I have been involved in experiments with wide range of individuals, from perfectly health individuals to individuals with ID and kids with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Involving end-users certainly adds to the complexity of the research but it not only improves the quality of the research but also adds to the personal skills of the researcher, e.g. I learnt to communicate fluently in Spanish which otherwise would have been very difficult. I strongly believe that such end-user collaborations only can make our research efforts fruitful by causing an end-user impact. At the same time, I also believe that such end-user driven research will motivate us to invest more in the generation of intellectual properties. These intellectual properties must be harvested via technology transfer to feedback our research. It is absolutely essential, especially in the context of our country where funding opportunities are usually