Mike Ligthart is an assistant professor in the Social AI research group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research develops social robots that interact meaningfully with people over longer periods of time, and he works most closely with children and the adults who support them. Together with children, hospitals, schools, and libraries, he has co-developed robots that support children through invasive medical procedures, offer personalised mathematics education, and hold richer conversations about books to stimulate reading motivation. A second line of his work concerns people living with dementia and their caregivers, asking how a robot can act as a catalyst for social contact between someone with dementia and the people around them.
Three commitments run through this work. The first is participatory design: research and system development happen together with the communities the robot is meant to serve. The second is collaboration with artists and creative professionals, such as theatre-makers, dramaturgs, and writers, who bring craft to how interactions between people and robots are shaped. The third is the careful integration of artificial intelligence, used to personalise human-authored content rather than replace the expertise behind it.
