Q: Were you always interested in technology? If not, when did you become interested and why?

A: As a child I was not exposed to technology in any significant way. My university degrees are in biology and natural sciences. However, as a student I became highly interested in computer science and artificial intelligence, which I then studied in parallel to my degrees. As a postdoc, I became fascinated by robots, and saw possibilities to bring in my knowledge from natural sciences for the development of social robots. I taught myself to build and program the robots, which I enjoyed immensely. Later, as an academic, I extended my work to human-robot interaction.