Prof. Dr.-Ing. Anna-Lisa Vollmer

Anna-Lisa Vollmer is Professor for Interactive Robotics in Medicine and Care at the Medical School OWL at Bielefeld University, Germany.
After receiving a M.Sc. in Mathematics in 2007, she worked on the topic of scaffolding with children and robots and received a PhD from the Research Center for Cognition and Robotics at Bielefeld University in cooperation with Honda Research Institute Europe in 2011. She then worked with Angelo Cangelosi on interactive loops, specifically, the adaptivity of humans towards robots in the alignment of actions and conformity, as an Experienced Researcher in the MSCA ITN Robotics for the Development of Cognition, at Plymouth University, UK (2011-2014). Subsequently, she was awarded a Starting Research Position working with Pierre-Yves Oudeyer investigating the co-construction in collaboration tasks at INRIA Bordeaux/ENSTA Paris, France.
In 2017, she joined the EXC 277 Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) as a member of the scientific board and postdoctoral researcher where she continued working on robot task learning in interaction with human users who do not have a technical background. In 2020, she joined the newly founded Medical School OWL building up collaborations with clinics and ambulatory partners, where she now leads her research group Interactive Robotics in Medicine and Care.

In her work, Anna-Lisa Vollmer aims to enable robot co-constructive task learning with lay users by studying the cognitive underpinnings of human teaching behavior, transferring findings on co-construction from human-human to human-robot interaction, developing robot learning approaches, adaptive robot behavior, user models, and multi-modal interfaces. Co-construction is especially important in the field of medicine and care, where individual preferences need to be learned from a diverse user group. Anna-Lisa Vollmer therefore investigates the implementation of such interactively learning socially assistive robots and service robots in medicine and care domains including questions of acceptance, adherence, and transfer from research into practice.

Anna-Lisa Vollmer is a Principal Investigator in the DFG-funded TRR 318 Constructing Explainability and the collaboration project Reducing Mental Model Mismatch for Cooperative Robot Teaching with the Honda Research Institute Europe, and a member of SAIL: Sustainable Life-Cycle of Intelligent Socio-Technical Systems, funded by the MKW NRW.