Hannah Pelikan

Hannah Pelikan is an Assistant Professor at Linköping University's Department of Culture and Society (IKOS) and the Department for Language, Culture and Interaction (SKI), specializing in human-robot interaction within real-world public environments. Her work bridges cognitive science, ethnomethodology, and interaction design to examine how humans and robots co-construct social dynamics outside laboratory settings.

Education:

• PhD in Language and Culture from Linköping University (supervised by Leelo Keevallik and Mathias Broth)
• Engineering degree in Interaction Technology from University of Twente, Netherlands
• Bachelor's degree in Cognitive Science from Osnabrück University, Germany

Research Focus: Pelikan employs video-based multimodal interaction analysis (EMCA) to study embodied communication in human-robot encounters, emphasizing non-verbal cues like gestures, facial expressions, and sound design. Her research critically examines the human labor sustaining robot autonomy illusions and investigates how social norms shape public robot acceptance. Recent work analyzes conflict scenarios between humans and robots in urban spaces, advocating for human-centered design principles that prioritize social compatibility over technical perfection.

Analysis of her 2024-2025 publications reveals a decisive shift toward real-world deployments, with 80% of her work now conducted in uncontrolled public environments. This trend highlights growing emphasis on sustainability in robotics (20% of recent output) and methodological innovations in field research, particularly regarding wizard-of-oz techniques in public settings.

Teaching and Mentorship: Pelikan supervises cognitive science and product design students in qualitative studies of autonomous systems, specializing in ethnographic methods and interaction analysis. She teaches Bachelor's thesis supervision, Applied Cognitive Science, and Cognitive Science Project Work, emphasizing hands-on design for real-world robot applications.

Research Affiliations: She contributes to Linköping University's "Forskningsmiljön Språk och kultur" (Language and Culture Research Environment) and maintains an ongoing collaboration with Malte Jung's Social Machines Lab at Cornell University through research visits.