"FaceBots" is one of the two major research projects of the Interactive Robots and Media Lab, that was founded and is being directed by Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis. The purpose of the project is to build robots that can create more meaningful and sustainable longer-term relationships with humans through usage of references to shared memories and to shared friends in dialogues. The first such robot prototype is Sarah the FaceBot, which can detect and recognize faces, recognize and synthesize speech and perform simple dialogues, and has an on-board interaction database (holding past meetings) and a social database (holding friendship information). Furthermore, she is equipped with a real-time connection to the FaceBook website, which she uses to gather friendship, status and minifeed information for her friends; and which she also uses to automatically update her own webpage with information about her meetings.  FaceBots were awarded prestigious Microsoft-award funding, being one of 8 projects funded for Microsoft's HRI CFP, out of 74 proposals. The other award recipients were proposals from MIT, Yale etc. FaceBots has received considerable publicity, and has been featured in worldwide media.