Short Bio

Eunyoung Hwang earned her B.Sc. in Biomedical Science (Biotechnology and Bioinformatics) from Soongsil University, South Korea and completed her M.Sc. in Cognitive Science, specializing in Artificial Intelligence, Neuroinformatics and Robotics, at Osnabrück University, Germany. During her master’s she participated in a Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) project, where she designed a dialogue system for a guessing game (Q20) for the Pepper robot to enable interactive and naturalistic human–robot communication. Prior to starting her PhD, Eunyoung worked as a Scientific Researcher at the Robert Koch Institute in Germany, contributing to the NalaA project (NLP for Event-based Surveillance) in collaboration with the Africa CDC where she involved developing African language models, particularly for Sesotho, to detect public health threats from social media data and support early warning systems. Eunyoung’s current research interests include Human-Robot social Interaction, multimodal AI, and Transformer-based models. 

Topic

The objective of this project is to develop a robotic system that is able to understand and appropriately interpret human multimodal cues for predicting the intentions and future actions of other actors while sharing the same environment with the robot. The project intends to investigate how multi modalities can leverage natural mechanisms to understand users’ intentions, beliefs and understanding of the situational context. To this extent, this research
project will effectively mix MLLM and Transformer models with cross-modal attention layers for simultaneously identifying and interpreting human social verbal and non-verbal cues, understanding people’s intentions, and endowing robots with natural intelligence so that they can select their subsequent actions.

Host Institution:Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II – Napoli, Italy

PhD Enrollment: Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II

PI: Prof. Silvia Rossi