Silver Lining for Learning

Digital Caregivers: Finding Meaning with Social Robots


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Feb 22 2025 60 mins   1
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In Episode #224 of Silver Lining for Learning (SLL), David Crandall and Selma Šabanović, from Indiana University Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering will be discussing robots for social and elderly therapy. Social robotics is an exciting field and those of us at SLL are extremely excited to feature them on this upcoming show. Importantly, talking robots can play a vital role for those who are living with dementia. Robots will play an increasing role in the space of eldercare and supporting aging overall (see link to Wired Magazine article at the bottom of this blog post). The Wired article highlights some of the ways in which conversational robots can help people gain more meaning into their lives as they age and unfortunately suffer from brain diseases like dementia. As Selma Šabanović mentioned in Wired, "“We’re interested in making a difference for people through our research now, regardless of how well the technology works or how fast it might become a product and we can hand it off to them to take it home,” Šabanović further stated, “It’s not just about the robots, it’s about making a difference, connecting with people, creating relationships with the community and having an opportunity for mutual learning.” The research is ongoing. Listen to or watch this session and learn about the results so far as well as next steps.

Luddy Professor of Computer Science
Director of Luddy Artificial Intelligence Center
Director of Center for Machine Learning

David Crandall received the Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University in 2008 and the M.S. and B.S. degrees in computer science and engineering from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, in 2001. He worked as a postdoctoral associate at Cornell from 2008-2010, and as a research scientist at Eastman Kodak Company from 2001-2003. Dr. Crandall’s main research interest is computer vision, the area of computer science that tries to design algorithms that can “see”. He is particularly interested in visual object recognition and scene understanding. He is also interested in other problems that involve analyzing and modeling large amounts of uncertain data, like mining data from the web and from online social networking sites. Take a look at Dr. Crandall's Computer Vision Lab website. IU Homepage: https://luddy.indiana.edu/contact/profile/index.html?David_Crandall

Since joining IU in 2010, he has been PI or Co-PI on over $24 million in research grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, Yahoo, Google, Meta/Facebook, NVidia, the U.S. Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the U.S. Navy, NASA, Toyota Research Institute, the IU Office of the Vice President for Research, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Office of Naval Research, the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Indiana Innovation Institute (IN3), the U.S. Department of Defense, and Eastman Kodak Company. He has published over 200 technical articles in top international venues, and has received best paper awards or nominations in CVPR, WWW, CHI, ICCV, and ICDL. He has received an NSF CAREER award (2013), two Google Faculty Research Awards (2014 and 2020), an IU Trustees Teaching Award (2017), a Grant Thornton Fellowship (2019), a Luddy Professorship (2021), and Distinguished ACM Membership (2022).

Selma Šabanović is a Professor of Informatics and Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington. She studies social robotics and human-robot interaction, with a focus on exploring how robots should be designed to assist people in various use contexts, including mental health, wellness, education, and social participation. She works with existing and potential robot users of all ages, from children to older adults, and in various cultures, including East Asia, Europe, and the US. She currently serves as the Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs for the Luddy School and as an Associate Vice President of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Educational Activities Board. She previously served as the Editor in Chief of the ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction from 2017-2024. She received her PhD in Science and Technology Studies in 2007 from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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