As part of the EuroScholars Program, undergraduate students Elio (University of North Texas) and Matthew (University of Alabama) did their internship under my supervision at the Cognitive Psychology Unit. They arrived in January 2025, and returned to the US in June 2025, having been embedded in the unit for a semester. During this period, they attended lab meetings, did coursework, and worked as research assistants in my lab.

As a cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, I am interested in how humans interact with technology, specifically robots. In our project, we wanted to look at the effect of encouragement from robots on physical exercise. The project was embedded in a broader research program investigating attitudes toward robots and AI in general. It is known, for example, that anthropomorphism (a robot’s physical resemblance to humans) is related to likability and social behavior toward robots. The data collected by Elio and Matthew will be used by a future (EuroScholars?) student as a foundation for a paper on which Elio and Matthew will be acknowledged. 

To further this research line, I used the EuroScholars Travel Grant to plan a 9-day trip to visit Profs. Abdullah Konak and Sadan Kulturel-Konak at Penn State University. Prof. Konak is Distinguished Professor of Information Sciences and Technology, and Prof. Kulturel-Konak is Professor of Management Information Systems and Director of the Flemming Creativity, Entrepreneurship and Economic Development (CEED) Center at PSU. I had planned to give one talk at the main Penn State campus in University Park PA, and a meet-and-greet at the Berks campus in Reading PA. While Profs Konak and Kulturel-Konak are primarily interested in the operations research application of AI, a possible collaboration investigating human-computer interaction in the operations research chain is on the table. After my talk, I handed out information leaflets of the EuroScholars program, so that hopefully in the future a EuroScholars student will be able to assist us in getting this US-Dutch collaboration going.