Selma Sabanovic

Selma Sabanovic is a professor of informatics at Indiana University Bloomington. Her work combines the social studies of computing — focusing particularly on the design, use and consequences of socially interactive and assistive robots in different social and cultural contexts — with research on human-robot interaction and social robot design.

She founded and directs the R-House Laboratory for Human-Robot Interaction research at IU Bloomington, which brings together faculty and students to study the principles of human-robot interaction and design and evaluated robots for various applications, including health care, education and home use.

Sabanovic’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and Indiana University. She is editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions of Human-Robot Interaction. She spent summer 2014 as a visiting professor at Bielefeld University’s Cluster of Excellence Center in Cognitive Interaction Technology. She was a lecturer in Stanford University’s Program in Science, Technology and Society in 2008-09 and a visiting scholar at the Intelligent Systems Institute in AIST, Tsukuba, Japan, and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

She received her Ph.D. in science and technology studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2007.

Areas of Expertise

Human-robot interaction, social robotics, science and technologies studies, social studies of robotics, robots in society, cross-cultural studies of technology, robots in U.S. and Japan, assistive robotics, technology for elder care, health care robotics.