Mike Ligthart is an assistant professor in the Social AI research group at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His research develops social robots that interact meaningfully with people over longer periods of time, and he works most closely with children and the adults who support them. Together with children, hospitals, schools, and libraries, he has co-developed robots that support children through invasive medical procedures, offer personalised mathematics education, and hold richer conversations about books to stimulate reading motivation. A second line of his work concerns people living with dementia and their caregivers, asking how a robot can act as a catalyst for social contact between someone with dementia and the people around them.

Three commitments run through this work. The first is participatory design: research and system development happen together with the communities the robot is meant to serve. The second is collaboration with artists and creative professionals, such as theatre-makers, dramaturgs, and writers, who bring craft to how interactions between people and robots are shaped. The third is the careful integration of artificial intelligence, used to personalise human-authored content rather than replace the expertise behind it.

Ligthart's expertise lies in child-robot interaction, human-centred artificial intelligence, and participatory design. He is best known for his work on the child-robot relationship, and for showing that letting children co-create the interaction, e.g. by choosing their own stories, secret handshakes, and learning paths, is what makes a robot worth returning to. He develops hybrid agentic AI that combines the safety of rule-based systems with the creativity of generative AI, so that children, teachers, and artists can personalise content without ceding authorship to a machine. He translates these findings into reusable interaction design patterns and into open-source software: he leads the development of Nardial, a dialogue management library for narrative human-robot interaction, and co-leads the Social Interaction Cloud, a platform that lowers the barrier to building social robot applications that is currently being used in over a dozen projects.

Ligthart teaches in the Bachelor's and Master's programmes in Artificial Intelligence at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. His signature course, Socially Intelligent Robotics, asks students to build social capabilities, such as dialogue management, conversation design, non-verbal expression, and visual social awareness on a humanoid robot, and then put them to the test on stage: groups of students create a short theatrical performance together in which the robot must improvise with human performers rather than follow a script. Theatre serves here as both sandbox and stress test, exposing students to the open-ended, unpredictable social situations that the lab tend to miss. In Robot Interaction he introduces bachelor's students to the fundamentals of HRI research, and in AI & Society he examines with master's students how artificial intelligence reshapes the social world it is deployed in.

His teaching covers:

• Socially intelligent robotics and robot software development
• Human-robot interaction design and evaluation
• The societal and ethical implications of artificial intelligence
• Bachelor's and Master's thesis supervision in Artificial Intelligence

• Zelfstandig | Nieuwegein | Geven van lezingen masterclasses, en andere infotainment over sociale robots en kunstmatige intelligentie. | 2021-11-01 - present

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