Mari Velonaki is a Professor of Social Robotics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She is the founder and director of the Creative Robotics Lab (Art, Design & Architecture UNSW) and the founder and director of the National Facility for Human Robot Interaction Research (UNSW, USYD, UTS, St Vincent’s Hospital). She is also a Research Leader at the UNSW Ageing Futures Institute.

Velonaki has worked as an artist and researcher in the field of interactive media art since 1997, driven by her fascination with the complex area of human-machine interaction. Her research begins from a series of interactive installations that engage the spectator/participant with digital and robotic characters in interplays stimulated by sensory triggered interfaces. Her principal contribution to the field of HRI is the creation of experimental interfaces that allow for the development of haptic and immersive relationships between the participants and the robotic agents. She has created intellectually and emotionally engaging human-machine interfaces that incorporate movement, speech, touch, breath, electrostatic charge, artificial vision, light and text.

In 2003 Velonaki began to work with robotics, initiating and leading a major Australian Research Council Linkage art/science research project Fish-Bird: Autonomous Interactions in a Contemporary Arts Setting (2004-2006) in collaboration with robotics scientists at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics. Fish-Bird is recognised internationally as a significant artwork and as an exemplary model of fully-engaged interdisciplinary research.

Professor Velonaki’s research is situated in the multi-disciplinary field of Social Robotics. She holds a PhD in Experimental Interface Design (UNSW 2003). She has been voted by Robohub - a large robotics community of researchers, educators and industry - as one of the world’s 25 women in robotics you need to know about.

Velonaki’s contributions in the areas of Social Robotics, Responsive Systems and Human-Machine Interface Design include:

• Created novel interfaces between a human and a robot that include the modalities of movement as body language, touch as an encoder of human emotion.

• Created interactive robots that are of human scale and have substantial presence in the physical world.

• Introduced open experimentation whereby robots are placed in public spaces and not tested only in laboratory settings. 

• Velonaki has assembled two of the world’s largest datasets (over 690,000 recorded interactions in 13 countries) in human-robot interaction (HRI) studies that provide valuable information on the qualitative dimensions of human-machine interactions.

She is the recipient of several competitive grants and has collaborated extensively with industry partners in Australia, Europe, Japan and the United States.

Velonaki’s robots and interactive installations have been exhibited worldwide, including: National Art Museum, Beijing; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea; ZENDAI Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; Aros Aarhus Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Wood Street Galleries, Pittsburgh; Millennium Museum - Beijing Biennale of Electronic Arts; Ars Electronica, Linz; Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art; Conde Duque Museum, Madrid; European Media Arts Festival, Osnabrück; Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand; Arco, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery/GOMA; Art Gallery of New South Wales.