Teena Chakkalayil Hassan: Learning about the nature of humans from robots

Teena Chakkalayil Hassan really likes her new office. It is located on the second floor of the E building, is spacious, flooded with light and offers a sweeping view over Sankt Augustin to the east. What is missing are personal items or pictures on the walls. However, she only recently moved into the office located on the President's corridor. More precisely, after she took up her new position as Vice President on 1 March. At the beginning of the year, the University Election Assembly elected the computer science professor to this office with an overwhelming majority. In this role, she will be responsible for international affairs and digitisation. Teena Chakkalayil Hassan definitely wants to hang up pictures. She doesn't know which ones yet. But she does know that the motifs should be positive and show joy and optimism. For example, she has a picture at home that shows the sun and lots of greenery. "It gives me strength and joy," she says, "and the feeling that I'm part of something bigger." She is also thinking about hanging sayings on her wall. Over the years, she has amassed a collection of sayings that she finds helpful in difficult situations. "Extreme justice is extreme injustice" is one such saying. The quote is attributed to Cicero, who wanted to express the fact that justice quickly falls by the wayside when the law claims to regulate every little thing.  The thought process behind it, says Teena Chakkalayil Hassan, has made her very thoughtful. She finds the pursuit of justice very important. "But there is also a danger," she says, "that we overlook something." For her, it is very important to look at things from multiple perspectives. "Nothing is perfect," she says, "so it's good to find a middle ground."

Leaving India for a Master's degree

Hassan has big plans for her new office as Vice President International Affairs and Digital Transformation. She wants to improve the support services for students from abroad and establish further international partnerships and intensify existing collaborations. She also wants to strengthen the digital skills of all university members - especially with regard to the topic of artificial intelligence. She embodies both of these topics, internationalisation and digitisation, in an ideal way. Born in India, she completed her Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at the Cochin University of Science and Technology. She left India for her Master's degree to study one of her favourite topics at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in the Autonomous Systems degree programme: improving people's quality of life through the development of new technologies. After this time at H-BRS, she worked for the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and received her doctorate from the University of Bamberg. After stints at the University of Bielefeld and as a postdoctoral researcher in Bremen, she returned to H-BRS as a professor in March 2023, where the expert in human-robot interaction took over as Head of the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Autonomous Systems (A2S) in September 2023.

In her research, Hassan focuses intensively on the analysis of human emotions and behaviour by affective computer systems. On the one hand, this serves to improve the interaction between humans and machines. On the other hand, the findings are used, for example, to develop assistance systems for people with disabilities. She combines all of these aspects within her research activities in the field of "Socially Assistive Robotics" at the A2S Institute.

Learning about the nature of humans from robots

She has learnt a lot about humans through robots, says the professor. "I have learnt," she says, "how wonderfully they function, even though they have so many disadvantages, their memory is not perfect and they don't have all the information." When programming robots, she realised how difficult it is to be an autonomous being. Her conclusion: "I accept that I don't know everything and that the whole picture only emerges from the parts that everyone knows." She is convinced that this attitude also makes it easier to resolve conflicts.

Her confidence in the strength of the many perspectives also makes the Vice President very optimistic about the security of the university's digitisation: "We have experts in all departments who drive and support teaching, research and transfer. We have ITS and IT administrators who work intensively with digital technology and, above all, our students, who are very enthusiastic about digitalisation topics. They know so much. Together, we can create huge momentum."

Text: Martin J. Schulz