Guy Laban
Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Ben Gurion University of the Negev
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About Me
I am a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management of Ben Gurion University of the Negev.
My research examines how people communicate and share their emotions with artificial agents, agents that communicate and reason using artificial intelligence, including social robots and chatbots. I study how these agents understand and interact more effectively with humans, and how these interactions influence social dynamics and emotional well-being. In my research, I am working on interactions and interventions that facilitate rich social interactions with human users to support their health in a variety of contexts.
I was a research associate at the Department of Computer Science & Technology of the University of Cambridge. I was a member of the Affective Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory (AFAR) under the lead of Prof. Hatice Gunes. Before that, I pursued my PhD studies under the supervision of Prof. Emily S. Cross (University of Glasgow & ETH Zürich) and Prof. Val Morrison (University of Bangor) 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 taking photographs. See my gallery at my photography website!
Contact Info
Laban [at] bgu . ac . il
Publications
Abbasi, N. I.*, Dogan, F. I.*, Laban, G.*, Anderson, J., Ford, T., Jones, P. B., & Gunes, H. (2025). Robot-Led Vision Language Model Wellbeing Assessment of Children. 2025 34th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (ROMAN). arxiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02765 (🏆KROS Interdisciplinary Research Award Winner in Social Human-Robot Interaction,🏆Best paper nominee, 🏆Best student paper nominee).
Laban, G., Chiang, S., & Gunes, H. (2025). What People Share With a Robot When Feeling Lonely and Stressed and How It Helps Over Time. 2025 34th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (ROMAN). arxiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.02991
Chiang, S.*, Laban, G.*, Cross, E. S., & Gunes, H. (2025). Self-Disclosure Themes and Semantics Across Human, Robotic, and Disembodied Conversational Partners. 2025 34th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN). arxiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.06374v1
Powell, H.*, Laban, G.*, & Cross, E. S. (2025). A Multimodal Neural Network for Recognizing Subjective Self-Disclosure Towards Social Robots. 2025 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). arxiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.10828
Laban, G., Morrison, V., Kappas, A., & S. Cross, E. (2025). Coping with Emotional Distress via Self-Disclosure to Robots: An Intervention with Caregivers. International Journal of Social Robotics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-024-01207-0
Laban, G., Hough, J., Lee, M., Markelius, A., Foster, M. E., Stuart-Smith, J., & Ahmad, M. I. (2025). Bias and Fairness in Conversational User Interfaces. Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI), 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1145/3719160.3728629
Mehra, V.*, Laban, G.*, & Gunes, H. (2025). How Large Language Models Classify and Semantically Explain Facial Expressions from Valence-Arousal Values. Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (CUI), 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1145/3719160.3737618
Abbasi, N. I., Laban, G., Ford, T., Jones, P. B., & Gunes, H. (2025). A Longitudinal Study of Child Wellbeing Assessment via Online Interactions with a Social Robot. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 14(3), 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1145/3722123
Warren-Smith, G., Laban, G., Pacheco, E.-M., & Cross, E. S. (2025). Knowledge cues to human origins facilitate self-disclosure during interactions with chatbots. Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans, 100174. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.CHBAH.2025.100174
Spitale, M., Axelsson, M., Jeong, S., Tuttösí, P., Stamatis, C. A., Laban, G., Lim, A., & Gunes, H. (2025). Past, Present, and Future: A Survey of The Evolution of Affective Robotics For Well-being. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1109/TAFFC.2025.3567740
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/10.1109/RO-MAN60168.2024.10731253
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
Laban, G.*, Spitale, M.*, Axelsson, M., Abbasi, N. I., & Gunes, H. (2025). Critical Insights about Robots for Mental Wellbeing. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.13739
Laban, G., Wang, J., & Gunes, H. (2025). A Robot-Led Intervention for Emotion Regulation: From Expression to Reappraisal. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.18243v1
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
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
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