Quarterly meeting 3/2026 of HUMAIN
Since the unforgettable NordiCHI 2026 conference has taken a lot of our time and attention this autumn, the Quarterly meetings 3 of HUMAIN was delayed and we gathered on a windy October afternoon at Academill of Åbo Akademi University near the sea.
The NordiCHI 2026 conference in Vaasa in the beginning of October was a great success. For those who still want to recall the art-based approaches of the conference NordiCHI 2026, here is a fresh blog post written by Professor Rebekah Rousi from University of Vaasa: Feel the pulse – Arts-Based Approaches at NordiCHI 2026.
This quarterly meeting of HUMAIN began by introducing the new people to the project group. Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence Johan Pensar from Åbo Akademi University and Associate Professor of Marketing Joni Salminen from University of Vaasa joined the HUMAIN family during the fall. They also briefly talked about their interest related to HUMAIN.
Senior Lecturer Mirja Andersson from VAMK discussed the progress of the robot dog tender process. Then, Research Project Coordinator Susanne Hägglund provided an overview of the PharmAssist Research through Design project and led us downstairs to Experience Lab at Åbo Akademi University where Doctoral researcher Mattias Wingren presented the project’s human-robot interaction design on the human-like Furhat robot platform.
Presentations and a workshop
In addition to a status update of the project, we had a few project presentations on our agenda as well as a talk by Leader of the Intelligent Systems Institute Johan Westö from Novia University of Applied Sciences. His topic was “From Programming to Prompting Robots”.
The meeting climaxed with a workshop considering collaboration possibilities related to HUMAIN.