Postdoctoral Associates
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
Office: 32-271
dkonto@mit.edu

I’m a Computer Scientist working as a PostDoctoral Researcher in Human-Robot Interaction at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Julie Shah’s Interactive Robotics group at CSAIL. Previously, I was a PostDoc at the Science of Intelligence Centre and Verena Hafner’s group at Humboldt University of Berlin. I received my PhD in Computer Science from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, supervised by Joakim Gustafson and Gabriel Skantze. During my PhD, I visited Eric Horvitz’s group at Microsoft Research in Seattle mentored by Dan Bohus and Sean Andrist, Mohammad Soleymani’s group at the Institute for Creative Technologies (University of Southern California) in Los Angeles, and David Schlangen’s group at the University of Potsdam in Berlin where I also held a PostDoctoral position after my PhD. I regularly publish in HCI venues, such as HRI, CHI, and ICMI, in addition to psychology and computer science journals. I am generally interested in how robots’ embodiment and non-verbal behaviours affect the process of establishing, maintaining, and repairing mutual understanding as well as how robots explain their behaviour to humans.