As director of the SFU Rosie Lab, her current research focuses on building robots with social intelligence and empathy, particularly using affective and developmental robotics paradigms. Before that, she spent 4 years as a Software Engineering Manager at SoftBank Robotics in Paris, where she led the emotion recognition team for Pepper the humanoid robot. She has been featured on the BBC, given talks at SXSW and TEDx, hosted a TV documentary on robotics, and was recently featured in Forbes 20 Leading Women in AI. She is a native of Vancouver, with a B.Sc. in Computing Science from SFU and a Ph.D. and Masters from Kyoto University, Japan.