ESR 8

ESR 8
Mehdi Hellou

BIO

Mehdi is a PhD student in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Manchester (UoM).

He studied at the school of engineering Polytech Sorbonne at the Sorbonne University (previously known as University of Pierre and Marie-Curie) for five years. Withing these years, Mehdi took two years of undergraduate studies in Science, Technologies, and Health at Sorbonne University, followed by three years at Polytech Sorbonne in the domain of Robotics.

In his fifth year, he had the opportunity to make an exchange study during four months at the University of Laval by taking courses related to Machine Learning (ML) and Computer Vision.

He finished his master's degree thesis after six months of internships at SoftBank Robotics Europe in Paris, where he worked under the supervision of Dr. Bahar Irfan, Alexandre Mazel, and professor Frederic Plumet. His subject concerned personalization in the long term for human-robot interaction.

It involved the adaptation of a barista robot scenario followed by a real-world experiment at Cité Universitaire (Paris).

After his graduation at Polytech Sorbonne, Mehdi started a new Master in Artificial Intelligence at Sorbonne University called ANDROIDE for Robotics, Decision Making, Reinforcement Learning, Multi-Agent and Highly Interactive Virtual Environments. He concluded with an internship at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Dr. Mohan Sridharan.

His work focused on the domain of knowledge representation and Deep Learning for social robots.

The subject's purpose was to use human emotions to adjust the behaviours of a social robot by employing ML methods to recognize emotions and build a knowledge base to reason on emotions.

His current research focuses on applying the Theory of Mind's (ToM) premises for personalized interactions. It will include the design and test of a computational architecture for ToM that considers each user's differences and needs to support the personalization of the robot's interaction with the user.