In August 2025, EMOROB organised two internal workshops aimed at sharing research progress and promoting interdisciplinary discussion within the team.
The on-site sessions offered a space for team members to present their projects and exchange ideas, including two new members of the EMOROB team.
The first workshop featured Mateusz Kowalczyk, PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk, who presented his ongoing project conducted during research mobility in Brno. His work focuses on mapping the visual characteristics of the Moravian Karst caves and developing extended reality (XR) environments, focusing on time perception, isolation, and emotional experience from neurodivergent perspectives.
In the second workshop, Mengzhu An, postdoctoral researcher at Masaryk University, shared insights from her ongoing ethnographic research on emotion AI and AI-driven autism technologies in the Chinese context.
Both sessions contributed to ongoing discussions within the EMOROB team concerning the ethical, cultural, and social dimensions of social robotics and emotionAI research.
How do metaphors and analogies influence research of autism therapy? Ilaria Fornacciari explored this relationship and more in her talk "Mirroring Mechanical Metaphors: Materials for an Archaeology of “Emotional Competence”, from Asperger to Robot-Assisted Autism Therapy (RAAT)".
In November 2024, Ilaria Fornacciari participated in the Second International Symposium on Politics of Technologies in the Digital Age with her talk titled "In Real Time: Affective Technologies and the Epistemology of the Cognitive Subject" (presented online).
