Delara Forghani
👋 Hi, I'm Delara
I am a PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. My research area is desigining new interaction techniques and input methods, especially in Mixed Reality environments. Currently, I explore how to create interactive tutorials for users in augmented reality. I am part of the Exii Group supervised by Prof. Daniel Vogel.
I completed my Master's in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo, focusing on Human-robot Interaction and Social Robotics under the supervision of Prof. Kerstin Dautenhahn and Prof. Chrystopher Nehaniv in the Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Laboratory (SIRRL). My research involved developing a humanoid social robot (Pepper by Aldebaran Robotics) for presentation rehearsals, providing user with feedback on the speech style and the vocal delivery of the presentation.
Publications
2025
“System Development and Evaluation of a Social Robot as a Public Speaking Coach.”
International Journal of Social Robotics, 2025.
“A Deep Learning-Based Emotion Recognition Pipeline for Public Speaking Anxiety Detection in Social Robotics.”
IEEE RO-MAN 2025.