Dr. Nikolaos Mavridis has received his PhD from MIT in 2007, after receiving his MSEE from UCLA and a MEng in ECE from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Currently, he is serving as an Assistant Professor at the College of IT of the United Arab Emirates University, where he has founded and is directing the Interactive Robots and Media Laboratory (IRML). The lab is home to the microsoft-award winning "FaceBots" social robots project, as well as to "IbnSina", the first arabic-speaking humanlike humanoid. The current research Interests of Dr. Mavridis include: Social Robotics, Human-Robot Interaction, Language Grounding, and Cognitive Science. In his PhD thesis at MIT, he has introduced the "Grounded Situation Model" proposal, and has demonstrated its benefits by implementing it on Ripley, a manipulator robot with vision, touch, and speech synthesis/recognition. The sensorymotor/linguistic abilities of the resulting system were comparable to those implied by a standard psychological test for 3-year old children (The "Token Test"). Dr. Mavridis has received honorary fellowships from the Onasis foundation and the Hellenic State Fellowship organization, and he has also served in numerous leadership positions in the past.

http://www.dr-nikolaos-mavridis.com/