About Me

I’m Pourya Shahverdi, a Ph.D. candidate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oakland University and a researcher at the In Real-Life Intelligent Robotics Laboratory (IRL)². My work focuses on the intersection of social robotics, affective computing, and human-AI interaction, with an emphasis on building emotionally intelligent and context-aware AI systems.

I develop embodied conversational agents such as social robots and virtual avatars that can understand, adapt to, and influence human behavior in socially and emotionally meaningful ways. By integrating insights from psychology, communication science, and behavioral analysis into machine learning and affective computing models, I aim to achieve human-level expressivity and responsiveness in artificial agents.

My research addresses real-world challenges across various domains, including autism intervention, education, healthcare, customer service, and human resource development. For instance, I am designing a robot-mediated training framework for autism interventionists using a dual-robot setup. One robot simulates a child with ASD during rehearsal, while the other plays the trainer role and provides adaptive feedback during instruction. I am also contributing to the AvaMERG project, which focuses on multimodal emotion recognition and generation using large language models.

My long-term vision is to create AI systems that are not only capable and reliable but also emotionally responsive and socially intelligent. I believe that for AI to be truly impactful, it must engage with humans on both cognitive and emotional levels.

If you are interested in socially intelligent AI, affective computing, or human-robot interaction, feel free to reach out. I welcome opportunities for collaboration, discussion, and innovation.