My research falls into the fields of AI safety and human-robot interaction, spanning interests across robotics, multimodal interaction, virtual agents, and chatbots. I approach safety as a sociotechnical challenge, aiming to create AI-driven robotics applications that are safe by design and responsibly deployed within society and relevant industries. My current focus areas are digital literacy, trust, and assistive technologies, where I collaborate closely with the National Robotarium and the GRI in Health and Care Technologies. I am actively working on initiatives that place the nursing and healthcare workforce at the centre of digital innovation by involving them in co-production efforts to address their digital literacy needs. This includes co-developing applications to assist them in their daily work routine while co-producing teaching materials for both current and future healthcare workers to facilitate a smooth digital transformation. Digital literacy is also vital in schools, as teenagers often misuse and overly trust complex AI tools. It is crucial to understand how they use and relate to AI and robotics.  I am researching this behaviour to develop guidelines for schools, parents, policymakers, and developers to create safer, fairer, and more age-appropriate AI systems for young people. Ultimately, my inherently multidisciplinary work aims to improve state-of-the-art AI and robotics technologies, making them safer for public consumption across diverse settings.

Area of Expertise: Human-Robot Interaction, Socially Assistive Robots, Responsible AI, Trust and Trustworthy Autonomous Systems, Multi-Modal Interaction, Computer Vision

• “Are Nurses Ready for Robots? Understanding the Technological Literacy Needs of Nursing Students.” Funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, In collaboration with Dr Martina Fiori from Napier University.  One of the main barriers to robotics adoption in healthcare is that healthcare staff lack confidence in using and troubleshooting this new technology. Through co-producing a series of interdisciplinary workshops with students, academics and practitioners from the nursing and robotics disciplines, this project investigates how the technological literacy of the future nursing workforce can be developed through education.
• “Nurse Companion Robot System for Automated Patient Vital Signs Monitoring”. Funded by the EPSRC Impact Accelerator Award. The project will deliver a tool to assist nurses and care providers in collecting vital signs and other health-related data, helping to deliver better patient care and to reduce pressure on nursing staff by the digitalisation and automation of the processes of recording patient's physiological measurements. The project also contributes to providing knowledge and skills transfer to train the healthcare professionals of the future, contributing to generate impact in different areas of the health and care pathway. 
• "D-AI in the life: Understanding AI Use Among Teenagers in Unequal Context". Funded by the Google Academic Research Award, in collaboration with Dr Ilaria Torre from Chalmers University. This project investigates how teenagers develop trust, overtrust, or distrust in everyday interactions with AI systems such as chatbots. We focus on two youth populations: general-population teenagers in Edinburgh (UK) and immigrant- and refugee-background teenagers in Gothenburg (Sweden), addressing the intersectional risks faced by youth who are both digitally active and socially marginalised. Using a novel digital diary method that captures real-time chatbot interactions, we aim to document “a day in the life” of teenagers interacting with AI (“D-AI in the life”). By doing so, we hope to identify how social, linguistic, and institutional contexts shape teenagers’ use and perception of AI to inform policy and design guidelines for AI developers and institutions.