# Research

- URL: https://giubots.net/research/

Here you will find an overview of my research.
From the latest work on the VALAWAI project -- where I try to understand what awareness means for social robots and identify the values relevant in human-robot interactions -- through my exploration of language models as tools for working with values, to my early research on conversational troubleshooting, each research line below is a collection of related publications.

## [VALAWAI](https://giubots.net/research/valawai/index.md)

Most of my work as a PhD student revolves around the VALAWAI project, funded by the European Union’s Innovation Council. It focuses on developing VALue-AWare Artificial Intelligence systems that integrate human values into their functioning. Its goal is to enhance the ethical alignment and trustworthiness of AI applications by ensuring that they operate in ways that reflect the preferences of the people involved.
Within this project, my research focuses on social robots, with a particular interest in those deployed in a home. How can we ensure that robots abide by our values and support positive human interactions? How can we prevent manipulation and deception by robots? How do we ensure that they act in ways that respect human autonomy and dignity?

## [Embodied Awareness](https://giubots.net/research/embodied-awareness/index.md)

When I started working on the VALAWAI project, I had no idea what the people writing the proposal meant by “awareness”. In this research line, I explore what machine awareness is and how we can improve contextual awareness, especially in social robots.

## [HRI Values](https://giubots.net/research/hri-values/index.md)

Values are what shapes our thoughts and drives our actions. Over the years, philosophers, opinionated thinkers, and scientists have elaborated countless theories and taxonomies of human values; among these are Schwartz’s Theory of Basic Human Values and the Moral Foundations Theory. However, if we consider values to be an expression of preferences about the world around us, there is no need to limit ourselves to a specific theory. Furthermore, we can include other kinds of preferences, such as those related to the interaction with AI systems and robots. This line of research explores which values play a role in human-robot interactions and the consequences of the latest technological advancements on our lives.

## [Values and Generative AI](https://giubots.net/research/values-generative-ai/index.md)

If we define values as preferences over the states of the world, and if we can block out the screams of the researchers who devoted their lives to precise and scientifically based value taxonomies, then we will inevitably start wondering how to model and work with these preferences.
This line of research explores how large language models, thanks to their embedded common knowledge and their reasoning abilities, can help tackle this problem.

## [Conversational Troubleshooting](https://giubots.net/research/conversational-troubleshooting/index.md)

This early line of research started from my master’s thesis work on “Conversational Problem Solving Applied to a Data Science Pipeline Builder” and led to an implementation of client- and server-side components for conversational troubleshooting.

## [Collabs](https://giubots.net/research/collabs/index.md)

This research line groups together all those publications that are the results of collaborations and do not immediately fit into the other main areas of research.