Otto Hahn Medal for Alexis Block
The Max Planck Society honours Alexis Block, a former doctoral student at the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems, with the prestigious Otto Hahn Medal for her fundamental and innovative research in the field of human-robot interaction.
For the year 2021 on the occasion of the Annual Meeting of the Max Planck Society on June 22, 2022, Alexis Block will be awarded the Otto Hahn Medal for her research achievements in the field of human-robotic interaction through the creation and evaluation of intelligent hugging robots. Block started her doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and then enrolled in the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems, a research partnership between MPI-IS and ETH Zurich which promotes cross-disciplinary research in the field of learning systems. She earned her doctorate from ETH Zurich in 2021, where she spent one and a half years in the Computer Science Department and was co-supervised by Otmar Hilliges and Roger Gassert.
In her doctoral research, Alexis Block investigated how a robot could deliver a high-quality embrace to a human. Particularly the novel robotic platform called HuggieBot received international attention. HuggieBot is a human-sized hugging robot that has two padded arms, an inflatable sensing torso and a face screen mounted to a rigid frame. A camera above the screen visually senses the user at the start of the interaction and as they approach, and torque sensors on the shoulder pan and elbow flexion joints are used to embrace the user with comfortable pressure. Block developed HuggieBot together with Katherine J. Kuchenbecker, who is her primary doctoral advisor and the Director of the Haptic Intelligence Department at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Alexis Block is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Biomechatronics Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Read the official annoucement external pagehere.
About the Otto Hahn Medal
Every year since 1978, the Max Planck Society has awarded the Otto Hahn Medal to up to 30 young scientists and researchers for their outstanding scientific achievements, mostly in connection with their doctorate. The medal aims to motivate talented young people to pursue a career in research.