Guy Laban

Excited to share that my dissertation won a Dissertation Award 2nd Runner-Up from @ISREorg! Grateful for the guidance from my amazing supervisors @brain_on_dance & @ValMorrisonProf! Special thanks @ArvidKappas @ITN_ENTWINE for their support! Thanks #ISRE2024 for the recognition!

This week we hosted Guy Laban for a fascinating talk as part of the Sagol School of Neuroscience seminar series. Thank you for an insightful and thought-provoking lecture! @GuyLaban

Can a robot help you cope with emotional challenges? 🤖 New research led by Prof. @GuyLaban (BGU) with collaborators at Cambridge shows that structured conversations with a social robot improved students’ emotional understanding, sense of control, and mood over time.

SPASM: Stable Persona-driven Agent Simulation for Multi-turn Dialogue Generation Han Luo, Guy Laban arxiv.org/abs/2604.09212 [𝚌𝚜.𝙲𝙻 𝚌𝚜.𝙼𝙰] 💬Accepted to Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026)

DialogGuard: Multi-Agent Psychosocial Safety Evaluation of Sensitive LLM Responses. arxiv.org/abs/2512.02282

A chatbot’s introduction can influence how much users open up. When a chatbot is framed as a human, people tend to disclose more and feel more comforted—even if they suspect it’s not actually a person. dlvr.it/TPCMX1

It's been a summer of accolades for our researchers. Work by several members of this Department was honoured by leading conferences and organisations in fields ranging from #AI to #cybersecurity to #socialrobotics. Congratulations to our colleagues! cst.cam.ac.uk/news/summer-ac…

@Amit_Goldenb @AnatPerry @minzlicht @_desmond_ong arxiv.org/abs/2506.16473

Dear researchers on AI-empathy, We (@AnatPerry, @minzlicht, and @_desmond_ong) are writing a short review of current research on AI and empathy. We know your published work but are also looking for preprints or submitted papers that we may have missed. Share in comments!

@Amit_Goldenb @AnatPerry @minzlicht @_desmond_ong dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/36… The user study reported

@Amit_Goldenb @AnatPerry @minzlicht @_desmond_ong arxiv.org/abs/2503.18243

The #CUI2025 PROCEEDINGS are now LIVE in the ACM Digital Library! 📖🔍 Dive into the papers here: dl.acm.org/doi/proceeding… The conference kicks off TOMORROW (July 8) — just one sleep away!! Looking forward to a great week ahead! See you soon! 👏👏👏

@eranh75_eran ברכות ערן!

בשולי, שולי הדברים, אתמול העניקה לי האגודה העולמית לפסיכולוגיה פוליטית (ISPP) פרס על תרומה מדעית יוצאת דופן לתחום, ועל יישום של תובנות מהתחום בשדות חברתיים ופוליטיים. לא טרויאלי לקבל פרס מאגודה מדעית בינלאומית בימים האלו. בנאום שלי בפראג אמרתי שזה כבוד גדול עבורי לקבל את הפרס, אבל לצערי אני לא יכול לומר שאני שמח לקבלו. לא יכול לומר שאני שמח כי כל עוד החטופים לא חוזרים לביתם והמלחמה וההרג נמשכים, אין שום דבר מהסוג הזה (של פרסים, חשובים ככל שיהיו) שיכול באמת לשמח. מה שכן, הבטחתי לחברי האגודה, להמשיך בכל הכוח לנסות להשתמש בידע שלנו על מנת להביא למציאות טובה יותר לכל האנשים כאן באזור. מקווה ועדיין מאמין שזה אפשרי. ומבטיח לחזור לשמוח אחרי שזה יקרה.

🚨 New paper out w @ValMorrisonProf @ArvidKappas @brain_on_dance!➡️doi.org/10.1007/s12369… We studied how talking to a robot overtime can help caregivers cope with emotional distress. Key finding: Overtime, caregivers disclosed more, felt better, & coped better @ITN_ENTWINE

hi @ieeeroman, It says online that student registration includes "late-breaking report and robot design competition", but it doesn't mention paper. Is it a mistake, or do students with a full paper accepted need to pay for regular registration? 🤯

📢 Call for Papers Join us at the Bias and Fairness in Conversational User Interfaces workshop 💬 🗓️ July 8–10, 2025 📍 Waterloo, Canada (AT @CUI_Conference @ACM_CUI) Keynotes: Dorian Peters & @micol_spitale 🔗 Submit your work, demos, or provocations!➡️ sites.google.com/view/cuibnf2025

Hot off the press: Laban, G., Morrison, V., Kappas, A. et al. Coping with Emotional Distress via Self-Disclosure to Robots: An Intervention with Caregivers. Int J of Soc Robotics (2025). doi.org/10.1007/s12369… #socialrobotics #pepperrobot audio: notebooklm.google.com/notebook/eae92…

What People Share With a Robot When Feeling Lonely and Stressed and How It Helps Over Time. arxiv.org/abs/2504.02991

Join us for the REACT 2025 Challenge on Multiple Appropriate Facial Reaction Generation (MAFRG). Developing digital human/virtual agent that can express human-style facial reactions using our recently established MARS dataset (video, audio & EEG). lnkd.in/egrUga42