PhD Candidate in Human-Robot Interaction

Research Interests: Human-Robot Interaction, Trust, UX Research (AI/Robotics), Experimental design, Recommender Systems

As a developer, I have experience in Front-end Development and Python. Also, a good background in SEO.

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Latest News

[March. 2026]

🤖 🏥 How do we design robots that patients can trust, especially in sensitive healthcare settings?

I recently presented my poster at the AI for Science event at the The Royal Society, London, hosted by The Alan Turing Institute’s Fundamental Research team.

📃 Title: Designing Trustworthy Dermatology Robots: A Framework for Social, Tactile, and Transparent Interaction

My work on trustworthy dermatology robots is a multidisciplinary collaboration between human-robot interaction (HRI) and the medical sience bringing together robotics, healthcare, and patient-centered design.

It explores how social cues, touch, transparency, and reliability shape trust in close contact medical robots .

Great to connect with researchers across disciplines and see how AI is driving impactful science.

[Feb. 2026]

I am happy to share that I have recently successfully completed three courses and received their certificates in The Ethics of Research Involving Human Participants, provided by the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) and the University of Suffolk.

The aim of these courses is to strengthen the understanding of ethical research practices and to enhance the ability to navigate the challenges that arise when conducting research involving human participants.

The completed courses include:

The Ethics of Research Involving Human Participants: An Introduction
Navigating the Complexity, Risks, and Benefits of Emotionally Challenging or Sensitive Research
Research with Children and Young People

Education

PhD researcher in Computer Science (2026)
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK
Title: "Human-Robot Interactions - Effects of Agency, Autonomy and Embodiment on User Trust"
MSc in Computer Software Engineering (2018)
Qazvin Azad University (QIAU) , Qazvin, Iran
Thesis: "A Novel Multipath Trust Propagation Algorithm for Recommender Systems"
BSc in Computer Software Engineering (2014)
Payame Noor University (PNU) , Alborz, Iran
Diploma in Mathematics and Physics
Omide Iran High School , Alborz, Iran

Activities

Educational Experiences

- Visiting Lecturer (Computer Science Department)

University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK; 2026-Present

- Visiting Lecturer (Computer Science Department, Courses: Programming fundamentals with C++, Internet engineering, Software engineering lab, Database lab)

Karaj Branch; Azad University (KIAU), Alborz, Iran; 2022-2023

- IEEE Workshops Trainer (Font-end Development Courses)

West Tehran Branch; Azad University (WTIAU), Tehran, Iran; 2017-2018

- Graduate Research Assistant

Qazvin Azad University (QIAU), Qazvin, Iran, 2019

The main research area was improving the accuracy of the recommender systems by using trust propagation techniques and also implicit distrust values.

- Search Engine Optimization Trainer (Online Course)

LAITEC Institute, Associated with Sharif University, Tehran, Iran; 2017

- Member of the Research Team

Behpand Startup, Qazvin, Iran, 2017-2018

The main goal of Behpand is helping small online businesses to provide (better) recommendations for their users based on machine learning techniques."

Located in: SYNTECH (Technology and Innovation Center) at Qazvin Azad University, Qazvin, Iran

- CIW and SEO Trainer (Font-end Development, SEO and Wordpress Courses)
Tehran Institute of Technology, Alborz, Iran; 2012-2017

Reviewer

- The 18th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR + ART 2026)
- The 21st Annual IEEE/ACM International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2026)

- The 17th International Conference on Social Robotics + AI (ICSR 2025)

- The SCRITA 2025 workshops (Trust, Acceptance and Social Cues in Human Robot Interaction) organised at IEEE RO-MAN
- The 13th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction (HAI 2025)
- The SCRITA 2024 workshops (Trust, Acceptance and Social Cues in Human Robot Interaction) organised at IEEE RO-MAN
- Strategic Corporate Communication in the Digital Age

- Handbook of Research on Cross-Disciplinary Uses of Gamification in Organisations

Organising Team
The SCRITA 2025 workshop (Trust, Acceptance and Social Cues in Human Robot Interaction) organised at IEEE RO-MAN, Netherlands

The SCRITA 2024 workshop (Trust, Acceptance and Social Cues in Human Robot Interaction) organised at IEEE RO-MAN, USA

Technical Experiences

- Virtual Reality Developer (Unity & Meta Quest Pro)

Developed a virtual reality showcase of the University of Hertfordshire’s Robot House using Unity and Meta Quest headsets.

University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK; 2024-2025

Publications and Presentations

[ AI for Science (Poster Presentation) ]
F Amoe, Ali Fallahi, Abolfazl Zaraki, " Designing Trustworthy Dermatology Robots: A Framework for Social, Tactile, and Transparent Interaction ", Presented in the AI for Science conference hosted by The Alan Turing Institute’s Fundamental Research team at the The Royal Society, London, 31 March 2026.
[ ICSR 2025 ]
Ali Fallahi, Patrick Holthaus, Farshid Amirabdollahian, Gabriella Lakatos, " Effects of Perceived Robot Autonomy and Personal Differences on Trust in Human-Robot Interactions ", in Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Social Robotics + AI, 2025.
[ ROMAN 2025 - TRUST: Building trust in HRI workshop (SCRITA2025) ]
Ali Fallahi, Patrick Holthaus, Farshid Amirabdollahian, Gabriella Lakatos, " Autonomy, Agency, and Trust: Towards Integrated Calibration in Human-Robot Interaction ", Presented in the TRUST: Building trust in HRI workshop (SCRITA 2025) in conjunction with the IEEE RO-MAN 2025 conference, 29 August 2025.
[ ROMAN 2025 - TRUST: Building trust in HRI workshop (SCRITA2025) ]
F Amoe, Ali Fallahi, Abolfazl Zaraki, " Designing Trustworthy Dermatology Robots: A Framework for Social, Tactile, and Transparent Interaction ", Presented in the TRUST: Building trust in HRI workshop (SCRITA 2025) in conjunction with the IEEE RO-MAN 2025 conference, 29 August 2025.
[ TRUST 2025: SCRITA and RTSS @ RO-MAN 2025 ]
Alessandra Rossi, Patrick Holthaus, Gabriella Lakatos, Sílvia Moros, Ali Fallahi, Murat Kirtay, Marie Postma, Erhan Oztop
[ HAI 2024 ]
Patrick Holthaus, Ali Fallahi, Frank Förster, Catherine Menon, Luke Jai Wood, Gabriella Lakatos, " Agency Effects on Robot Trust in Different Age Groups ", in Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, 2024.
[ ICRoM 2023 ]
Ali Fallahi, Azam Bastanfard, Amineh Amini, Hadi Saboohi, " Building Movie Recommender Systems Utilizing Poster's Visual Features: A Survey Study ". The RSI 10th International Conference on Robotics and Mechatronics, Tehran, Iran, 14-16 November. 2022.
[ JARIE ]
Ali Fallahi, Javad Mohammadzadeh, " Leveraging Deep Learning Techniques on Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems ", in Journal of Applied Research on Industrial Engineering, 2021.
[ ETECH 2019 ]
Ali Fallahi, Sasan H.Alizadeh, " An Ensemble Method For Enhancing Collaborative Filtering Recommender Systems by MLP Neural Network Based on Trust Propagation ", in Proc. of The 4th Conference Electrical and Computer Engineering Technology, Tehran, Iran, 29 May. 2019.
[ FSEN 2019 (Poster Presentation) ]
Ali Fallahi, "An Improved Recommender System Using Trust Propagation and Multi Layer Perceptron Neural Network, (Poster Presentation) ", in Proc. of 8th IPM International Conference on Fundamentals of Software Engineering (FSEN2019), Tehran, Iran, 1-3 May. 2019.
[ The 9th joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Robotics and the 2nd RoboCup Asia-Pacific International Symposium 2018]
Ali Fallahi, Sasan H.Alizadeh, "Effect of Distrust Propagation to Enhance the Performance of Trust Based Recommender Systems", in Proc. of The 9th joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence & Robotics and the 2nd RoboCup Asia-Pacific International Symposium, Kish Island, Iran, Dec. 2018.

Others

[ arxiv ]
Ali Fallahi, Azam Bastanfard, Amineh Amini, Hadi Saboohi, " A Study on Enhancing User Engagement by Employing Gamified Recommender Systems ", June 2023
[ arxiv ]
Ali Fallahi, Azam Bastanfard, Amineh Amini, Hadi Saboohi, " Proposing a Semantic Movie Recommendation System Enhanced by ChatGPT's NLP Results ", May 2023
[ arxiv ]
Ali Fallahi, Amineh Amini, Azam Bastanfard, Hadi Saboohi, " Req-Rec: Enhancing Requirements Elicitation for Increasing Stakeholder's Satisfaction Using a Collaborative Filtering Based Recommender System ", March 2023

Presentations

[ AI for Science conference ]
Designing Trustworthy Dermatology Robots: A Framework for Social, Tactile, and Transparent Interaction, The event was hosted by The Alan Turing Institute's Fundamental Research team at the Royal Society, London on 31 March 2026.
[ The Alan Turing Institute PhD Student Presentations & Networking ]
Trust in HRI, The event was hosted by The Alan Turing Institute at the University College London Artificial Intelligence Centre on 24 October 2025.

Selected Project

University of Hertfordshire’s Robot House Immersive Experience Showcase
Working on a contract with the University of Hertfordshire (November 2024 - July 2025), I developed a virtual reality experience of the UH Robot House using Unity and Meta Quest headsets. This immersive showcase is designed to support outreach with industry partners, prospective students, and local schools by providing accessible, hands-on interaction with the university’s cutting-edge robotics and assistive technology research.

The project has been showcased at various events and locations.

Technical Skills

Programming Languages
Python, C++, php
Robotics Simulators

Gazebo, CoppeliaSim

Web Development
HTML, CSS, Javascript
Database systems
MySQL
Others
R (quantitative data analysis), ELAN (audio and video annotation), NVivo (qualitative data analysis), LaTeX, Unity, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Wordpress

Certificates

Navigating the Complexity, Risks, and Benefits of Emotionally Challenging or Sensitive Research

The UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) and the University of Suffolk, 2026

Research with Children and Young People

The UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) and the University of Suffolk, 2026

The ethics of research involving human participants: an introduction

The UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO) and the University of Suffolk, 2026

PyTorch for Deep Learning
DeepLearning.ai - Coursera, 2026
PyTorch: Advanced Architectures and Deployment
DeepLearning.ai - Coursera, 2026
PyTorch: Techniques and Ecosystem Tools
DeepLearning.ai - Coursera, 2026
PyTorch: Fundamentals
DeepLearning.ai - Coursera, 2026
Importing CSV Data into Neo4j
Neo4j Graph Academy, 2023
Graph Data Modeling Fundamentals
Neo4j Graph Academy, 2023
Cypher Fundamentals
Neo4j Graph Academy, 2023
Neo4j Fundamentals
Neo4j Graph Academy, 2023
Fundamentals of Reinforcement Learning
University Of Alberta, Online Course (Coursera), 2022
30 Days of ML program
Kaggle competitions, Online, 2021
Deep Learning Specialization
DeepLearning.ai - Coursera, 2020
Neural Networks and Deep Learning
DeepLearning.ai - Coursera, 2020
Improving Deep Neural Networks Hyperparameter tuning Regularization and Optimization scaled
DeepLearning.ai - Coursera, 2020
Structuring Machine Learning Projects
DeepLearning.ai - Coursera, 2020
Convolutional Neural Networks
DeepLearning.ai - Coursera, 2020
Sequence Models
DeepLearning.ai - Coursera, 2020
Machine Learning
Stanford University, Online Course (Coursera), 2018
Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) Certification
HTML5 Application Development, Yerevan, Armenia, 2017
Introduction to programming in Python
ARJANG High Education Institute, Tehran, Iran, 2017

Voluntary Activities

Researcher Networking Society, University of Hertfordshire Students' Union (Inclusion Officer)

Researcher Networking Society (RNS) is a society formed under the Students' Union of the University of Hertfordshire. RNS welcomes and supports UH researchers actively engaged in quality research. The main purpose of the society is to facilitate social and intellectual networking, and communication among researchers throughout the University. (November 2025 - Present).

University of Hertfordshire, Robotics Week (Team Member)
As part of a team from the University of Hertfordshire, I contributed to "Robotics Week", a series of hands-on robotics workshops delivered at a local school in Hatfield to inspire interest in science and technology among young students (18th - 21st June 2025, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England).

Working as part of a UH academic team, I helped deliver hands-on robotics sessions to school children, presenting a range of robotic platforms and running interactive experiments and scenarios tailored to different age groups. These activities required careful ethical consideration and age-appropriate experimental design and strengthened my experience in public engagement, widening participation, and agesensitive human-centred computing.

IEEE MetroXRAINE 2024 (Student Volunteer)
The 2024 IEEE International Conference on Metrology for eXtended Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Neural Engineering - IEEE MetroXRAINE 2024. (21st - 23rd October 2024, St Albans, Hertfordshire, England)
The Web Conference (Student Volunteer)
The ACM Web Conference 2022, was the 31st conference in the International World Wide Web Conference series. (25th - 29th April 2022, Online/Lyon, France). Due to the pandemic, the conference was hybrid, hosted by Lyon, France. I was a virtual SV.
The RecSys Conference (Student Volunteer)
The 15th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys). (25th - 29th April 2022, Online/Lyon, France). Due to the pandemic, the conference was hybrid, hosted by Amsterdam, Netherlands. I was a virtual SV.
Behpand Startup (Front-End Developer, Member of the Research Team)
I was a member of the research team and front-end developer in the Startup (Jan 2017 - Jan 2018). The main goal of Behpand is helping small online businesses to provide (better) recommendations for their users, based on machine learning techniques. Located in: SYNTECH (Technology and Innovation Center) at Qazvin Azad University, Qazvin, Iran
Cahoo Startup (Front-End Development and Design Team Leader)
An online supermarket, with the feature of comparison between items, usually based on their nutritional values. I was the the front-end development and design team leader in the startup (Jan 2015 - Jan 2016). Located in: SYNTECH (Technology and Innovation Center) at Qazvin Azad University, Qazvin, Iran
Mantaraham Conference - I’m a Designer (Member of the Organising Team at the Event)
It was the largest gathering of designers in Iran. I was a member of the organising team at the event. (21st February 2017, Tehran, Iran).

IEEE MetroXRAINE 2024

Web Conference 2022

RecSys Conference 2021

Festival of Social Science: Your Skills, Your Future

BCS Hertfordshire, The Chartered Institute for IT

University College London AI Centre

BCS Hertfordshire, The Chartered Institute for IT

Other Experiences (Licenses & Certifications)

Active IQ Level 2 Certificate in Gym Instructing (2025)

- Professionalism and customer care for fitness instructors

- Health and safety in the fitness environment
- Planning and instructing gym-based exercise

- Conducting client consultations to support positive behaviour change

- Principles of anatomy, physiology and fitness

Google Analytics for Beginners Google (Online Course), 2019
Advanced Google Analytics Google (Online Course), 2019
Google Analytics for Power Users Google (Online Course), 2019
Google Tag Manager Fundamentals Google (Online Course), 2019
Introduction to Data Studio Google (Online Course), 2019
The Fundamentals of Digital Marketing Google (Online Course), 2019
Machine Learning for Marketing: Essential Training, linkedin (Online Course), 2019
Content Marketing Certified, HubSpot Academy (Online Course), 2019
LinkedIn Video Marketing for Personal and Brand Pages, linkedin (Online Course), 2018
Design the Web: Responsive SVG Images, linkedin (Online Course), 2018
CSS with LESS and Sass, linkedin (Online Course), 2018

Society Memberships

Student Member of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT (2025- to present)
Student Member of ACM Community (2021-2022, 2024- to present)
Student Member of IEEE Communication Society and IEEE Computer Society (2017-2018)
Interaction Design Foundation (2018-2019)

Languages

Persian, Farsi: Native Proficiency
English: Professional Working Proficiency (TOEFL, GRE)
French: Beginner (A2 Level)

Hobbies

Playing chess
Gym
Providing free online contents and tutorials about Machine Learning, SEO and other related topics.

Conferences/Workshops Participated

PhD Student Presentations & Networking (The Alan Turing Institute in London), October 2024
Metrology for eXtended Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Neural Engineering (Conference), October 2024
Game Development with Unity Bootcamp (Online Course), October and November 2024
Writing a Literature Review with Zotero and Obsidian (Workshop), May 2024
Quantitative Data Analysis 2: Correlation and Regression Methods (Workshop), March 2024
Introduction to NVivo (Workshop), March 2023
Writing a Winning Research Proposal (Workshop), March 2024
Research Data Management (Workshop), March 2024
Attracting your Own Research Funding: Writing and Applying for Fellowships (Workshop), March 2024
Grant Writing Workshop for PhD and MSc by Research Students (Workshop), April 2024
Translating your Research Interest into a Programme of Research (Workshop), April 2024
Data Analysis in R (Workshop), April 2024
Quantitative Data Analysis 1: Hypothesis Testing, Sample Size and Power (Workshop), February 2024
Getting to Know R (Workshop), December 2023
Critical Thinking (Workshop), December 2023
Qualitative Methods (Workshop), November 2023
Critical Reading and Research-Oriented Writing (Workshop) 2024, November 2023
Survey Design and Analysis 1: Collecting, Summarising and Analysing Survey Data (Workshop), November 2023
Survey Design and Analysis 2: Data Analysis, Sample Size and Power (Workshop), November 2023
Research Ethics (Workshop), November 2023
Quantitative Analysis of Survey Data and Related Design Issues (Workshop), October 2023
31st ACM Web Conference,(Hybrid) Lyon, France, 25th-29th April 2022
The Winter Seminar Series (WSS), Advanced Topics in Computer Science and Engineering (Online) Iran, 24th-27th February 2022
15th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems,(Hybrid) Amsterdam, Netherlands, Sep-Oct 2021
The Fifth IPM Advanced School on Computing and Artificial Intelligence (ASOC 2021),(Online) Tehran, Iran, Sep 2021
Future of Web and Mobile Conference, Tehran, Iran, Dec 2018
Future of Web and Mobile Conference, Tehran, Iran, Mar 2018
Future of Web and Mobile Conference, Tehran, Iran, Feb 2017
"I am a Designer" Conference (The 2nd Largest Gathering of Designers in Iran),Tehran, Iran, Feb 2017
CoderConf Conference, Tehran, Iran, Aug 2016
Conference Under theSubject of "Modern Marketing Solution and Sales Growth", Tehran, Iran, Aug 2016
Iran Web Developers seminar, Tehran, Iran, Jul 2016
Qazvin Startup Weekend, Qazvin, Iran, Dec 2015

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