Guy Laban 

Postdoctoral Research Associate

About Me

I am a postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Computer Science & Technology of the University of Cambridge. I am a member of the Affective Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory (AFAR) under the supervision of Prof. Hatice Gunes.

My research examines how people disclose their emotions and needs to social robots, and how these, in turn, can support their well-being.  I am developing robotic agents that facilitate rich social interactions with human users to support their emotional health in a variety of contexts.

I pursued my PhD studies as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow under the supervision of Prof. Emily S. Cross (University of Glasgow & ETH Zürich), Prof. Val Morrison (University of Bangor), and co-supervision of Prof. Andrea Gaggioli (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore) at the Social Robots and Social Brain in Action labs at the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology of the University of Glasgow. I was an ESR member of ENTWINE, the European Training Network on Informal Care, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovation Training Network (ITN) funded by the European Union. 

In my free time, I enjoy spending time in the mountains hiking, snowboarding, and photography. See my gallery at my photography website - guyloveslife.com!

Contact Info

guy.laban [at] cl.cam . ac . uk

Twitter Profile - @Guylaban 

LinkedIn Profile

Institutional Profile

Google Scholar Profile

ResearchGate Profile

Location

Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge, William Gates Building, 15 JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 0FD, United Kingdom

Publications

Laban, G., Cross, E. S. (2024). Sharing our Emotions with Robots: why do we do it and how does it make us feel?. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/TAFFC.2024.3470984.

Laban, G., Laban, T., Gunes, H. (2024). LEXI: Large Language Models Experimentation Interface. Proceedings of the 2024 12th ACM International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI). doi: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.01488

Abbasi, N.*, Laban, G.*, Ford, T., Jones, P. B., Gunes, H. (2024). Robotising Psychometrics: Validating Well-being Assessment Tools in Child-Robot Interactions. 2024 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). doi: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2402.18325

Laban, G., Kappas, A., Morrison, V., & Cross, E. S. (2024). Building Long-Term Human–Robot Relationships: Examining Disclosure, Perception and Well-Being Across Time. International Journal of Social Robotics. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-023-01076-z

Laban, G., Morrison, V., & Cross, E. S. (2024). Social Robots for Health Psychology: A New Frontier for Improving Human Health and Well-Being. European Health Psychologist. url: https://www.ehps.net/ehp/index.php/contents/article/view/3442

Laban, G., Kappas, A., Morrison, V., Cross, E. S. (2023). Opening Up to Social Robots: How Emotions Drive Self-Disclosure Behavior. 2023 32nd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 1697–1704. doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309551

Laban, G., Araujo, T. (2022). Don’t Take it Personally: Resistance to Individually Targeted Recommendations from Conversational Recommender Agents. HAI 2022 - Proceedings of the 10th Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, 57–66. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3527188.3561929

Laban, G., Kappas, A., Morrison, V., Cross, E. S. (2022). User Experience of Human-Robot Long-Term Interactions. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, 287–289. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3527188.3563927

Polakow, T., Laban, G., Teodorescu, A., Busemeyer, J. R., Gordon, G. (2022). Social robot advisors: effects of robot judgmental fallacies and context. Intelligent Service Robotics, 15(5), 593–609. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-022-00438-2

Laban, G. (2022). Social Robots as Communication Partners to Support Emotional Health and Well-Being. 2022 10th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos (ACIIW), 1–5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1109/ACIIW57231.2022.10086018

Laban, G., Morrison, V., Kappas, A., Cross, E. S. (2022). Informal Caregivers Disclose Increasingly More to a Social Robot Over Time. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts, 1–7. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519666

Lee, M., Sin, J., Laban, G., Kraus, M., Clark, L., Porcheron, M., Cowan, B. R., Følstad, A., Munteanu, C., Candello, H. (2022). Ethics of Conversational User Interfaces. Extended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3503699

Laban, G., le Maguer, S., Lee, M., Kontogiorgos, D., Reig, S., Torre, I., Tejwani, R., Dennis, M. J., Pereira, A. (2022). Robo-Identity: Exploring Artificial Identity and Emotion via Speech Interactions. Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 1265–1268. doi: https://doi.org/10.5555/3523760.3523999

Powell, H.*, Laban, G.*, George, J.-N., Cross, E. S. (2022). Is Deep Learning a Valid Approach for Inferring Subjective Self-Disclosure in Human-Robot Interactions? Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 991–996. doi: https://doi.org/10.5555/3523760.3523921

Laban, G., Ben-Zion, Z., Cross, E. S. (2022). Social Robots for Supporting Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Diagnosis and Treatment. Frontiers in Psychiatry. 12:752874. doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.752874

Laban, G. (2021). Perceptions of Anthropomorphism in a Chatbot Dialogue: The Role of Animacy and Intelligence. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, 305–310, Virtual Event, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3472307.3484686

Følstad, A., Araujo, T., Law, E. L.-C., Brandtzaeg, P. B., Papadopoulos, S., Reis, L., Baez, M., Laban, G., McAllister, P., Ischen, C., Wald, R., Catania, F., Meyer von Wolff, R., Hobert, S., Luger, E. (2021). Future directions for chatbot research: an interdisciplinary research agenda. Computing 103, 2915–2942. doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/S00607-021-01016-7

Laban, G., George, J., Morrison, V., Cross, E. S. (2021). Tell me more! Assessing interactions with social robots from speech. Paladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics, 12(1), 136-159. doi: https://doi.org/10.1515/pjbr-2021-0011

Henschel, A.*, Laban, G.*, Cross, E. S.* (2021). What Makes a Robot Social? A Review of Social Robots from Fiction to a Home or Hospital Near You. Current Robotics Reports.  doi:  https://doi.org/10.1007/s43154-020-00035-0 

Laban, G., Araujo, TB. (2020). The Effect of Personalization Techniques in Users’ Perceptions of Conversational Recommender Systems. In IVA ’20: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA ’20), October 19–23, 2020, Virtual Event, Scotland UK. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3 pages. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/3383652.3423890  

Laban, G., Morrison, V., Cross, E. S. (2020). Let’s Talk About It! Subjective and Objective Disclosures to Social Robots. In Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. Association for Computing Machinery, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 328–330. doi: https://doi.org/10.1145/ 3371382.3378252  

Laban, G., Araujo TB. (2020) Working Together with Conversational Agents: The Relationship of Perceived Cooperation with Service Performance Evaluations. In: Følstad A. et al. (eds) Chatbot Research and Design. CONVERSATIONS 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11970. Springer, Cham. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-39540-7_15 

Laban, G. (2019). Don’t Take it Personally: resistance to Individually Targeted Recommendations with Anthropomorphic Recommender System (Master's thesis). University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.  Retrieved from: https://scripties.uba.uva.nl/search?id=694251 

PrePrints

Spitale, M., Axelsson, M.,  Jeong, S., Tuttosı, P., Stamatis, C. A., Laban, G., Lim, A., Gunes, H. (2024). Past, Present, and Future: A Survey of The Evolution of Affective Robotics For Well-being. doi: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.02957

Laban, G., (2024). Studying and Eliciting Self-Disclosure: Interdisciplinary Review of Research Methodologies and Behavioural Paradigms. doi: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/fhdek

Abbasi, N., Laban, G., Ford, T., Jones, P. B., Gunes, H. (2024). A Longitudinal Study of Child Wellbeing Assessment via Online Interactions with a Social Robot. doi: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2404.10593

Warren-Smith, G., Laban, G., Pacheco, E. M., Cross, E. S. (2023). Knowledge cues to human origins facilitate self-disclosure during interactions with chatbots. doi: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/7qsdn

Laban, G., Morrison, V., Kappas, A., Cross, E. S. (2023). Coping with Emotional Distress via Self-Disclosure to Robots: Intervention with Caregivers. doi: https://doi.org/10.31234/OSF.IO/GBK2J

Laban, G., Zeidler, C., Brussee, E. (2020, May 12). Binge-watching (Netflix) product placement: A content analysis on different product placements in Netflix originals vs. non-Netflix originals, and drama vs. comedy shows. doi: 10.33767/osf.io/hxjgf

* = Equal contribution