Techlabs visits Umeå & Vaasa

TechLabs took a trip to visit our partner universities and researchers at Vaasa University, Åbo Akademi Vaasa (Experience Lab) and the TAIGA centre at Umeå University.

We started the trip from Helsinki on Monday, took the train straight to the VME Lab in Vaasa to meet up with Rebekah Kousi and associated researchers. Quite early in our presentations we noticed we have a lot in common with our partnering universities, we are all interested in Human Robot Interaction and our expertise is so much wider and deeper working as a collective than as individuals. Shout out to Joni for showing us around the lab!

On Tuesday we met Susanne Hägglund at Experience Lab Vaasa, we're always exited to hear what Susanna is up to. The meeting was part of the TaFiDiAI research project, so naturally we discussed Finnish-Swedish dialects and data sets. We are always slightly jealous of their Experience Lab, something that stayed with us is the stage floor underneath all of experience lab where the cables have been managed, oh and also the Faraday cage room never seizes to impress.

The Botnia ferry transported us safely to the other side of the sea, Umeå! Here we checked in with Helena Lindgrens research group, Esteban Guerrero Rosero and Juan Carlos Nieves, they gave us insights on what research project were currently active at the massive centre for transdisciplinary research - the TAIGA centre at Umeå University. Umeå was completely snowed in due to a snow storm, but spirits were high among like-minded researchers.

Our final day, Thursday was filled with more collaborative efforts, after a social dinner with HRI researchers from Umeå Uni we were fired up for our seminar with Loïs Vanhee, the director for the Social AI track at the TAIGA centre. It seems we do a lot of work in parallel to what Umeå is working on, and we made some connections that will surely result in some more blog posts.

Overall, this robot trip was a huge success, we'll be working hard collectively, adding our near and distant friends to this web page as collaborators. We're also hoping to see our colleagues at our inauguration late February.