I am a PostDoc in the Social Cognitive Systems Group at CITEC, Faculty of Technology at Bielefeld University headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Stefan Kopp. My main research interest lies in verbal human-robot interaction, with a focus on behavior explanations for social robots and their effects on humans' evaluation of the robot, the interaction situation, as well as themselves within the interaction.

I completed my PHD in the VIVA project which aimed to build a mobile social robot that produces lively and socially appropriate behavior in interaction.
My research focused on equipping this lively social robot with the ability to provide appropriate behavior explanations in an intuitively understandable way. I aimed to achieve this by closely linking the social robots' explanation generation to its autonomous behavior generation architecture. I investigated effects of different self-explanations on users' perception of the robot and its behavior and proposed a socio-interactive explanation dialogue model that expands on the empirical findings on the usefulness of offering different explanation types as a response to users' explanation requests.
If you are interested to learn more about this research, check out my dissertation "Tell Me Why (and What)! Self-Explanations for Autonomous Social Robot Behavior".

Ph.D. Intelligent Systems
2018-2022, Universität Bielefeld
Dissertation: Tell Me Why (and What)! Self-Explanations for Autonomous Social Robot Behavior

M.A. Linguistics: Communication, Cognition and Speech Technology
2014-2017, Universität Bielefeld
Master Thesis: Child-Directed Speech in Human-Robot-Interaction: A Study on the Role of Pitch

B.A. Phonetics and Speech Processing
2011-2014, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU)

Stange, S. & Kopp, S. (2023). Towards Robots that Meet Users' Need for Explanation. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence (HHAI 2023). https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA230099

Schröder, F., Stange, S. & Kopp, S. (2023). Resolving References in Natural Language Explanation Requests about Robot Behavior in HRI. Companion of the 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ’23 Companion). https://doi.org/10.1145/3568294.3579981

Stange, S. (2022). Tell Me Why (and What)! Self-Explanations for Autonomous Social Robot Behavior. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld. https://doi.org/10.4119/unibi/2967737

Stange, S., Hassan, T., Schröder, F., Konkol, J. & Kopp, S. (2022). Self-Explaining Social Robots: An Explainable Behavior Generation Architecture for Human-Robot Interaction. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, Section AI & Business. Special Issue: Explanations in Human-AI Systems. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2022.866920

Stange, S., & Kopp, S. (2021). Explaining Before or After Acting? How the Timing of Self-Explanations Affects User Perception of Robot Behavior. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference of Social Robotics, ICSR 2021, Singapore, November 10-13, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_13 (Best Student Paper Award Nomination) (Conference Talk)

Stange, S., & Kopp, S. (2021). Effects of Referring to Robot vs. User Needs in Self-Explanations of Robot Behavior. Companion of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/3434074.3447174

Stange, S., & Kopp, S. (2020). Effects of a Social Robot's Self-Explanations on How Humans Understand and Evaluate Its Behavior. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Cambridge, UK. https://doi.org/10.1145/3319502.3374802 (Conference Talk)

Schodde, T., Hoffmann, L., Stange, S., & Kopp, S. (2019). Adapt, Explain, Engage—A Study on How Social Robots Can Scaffold Second-language Learning of Children. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 9(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1145/3366422

Stange, S., Buschmeier, H., Hassan, T., Ritter, C., & Kopp, S. (2019). Towards Self-Explaining Social Robots: Verbal Explanation Strategies for a Needs-Based Architecture. In Proceedings of the AAMAS 2019 Workshop on Cognitive Architectures for HRI: Embodied Models of Situated Natural Language Interactions, Montréal, Canada.

The VIVA project, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) aimed at developing a trustworthy, lively social robot, that is not only tolerated by users in the private context but rather seen as an attractive enrichment that supports the personal emotional wellbeing (October 2018-December 2021).

The L2TOR project (pronounced ‘el tutor’), funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 programme, aimed at investigating Children's Second Language Tutoring using Social Robots (January 2016-December 2018).

Summer Speaker Series @ Mirror Lab (Colorado School of Mines), led by Dr. Tom Williams
Behavior Explanations in Social Human-Robot Interaction (2022-07-27)

Psychology for Social Change 2022, a Glasgow University Psychology Society Conference
Social Human-Robot Interaction (2022-02-12)

Kolloquium „Psychologie trifft Technologie“, @ Human Centered Design for Socio-digital Systems Group (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), led by Dr. Laura Kunold
Respecting each other`s needs - A step towards socially resonant human-robot co-existence? with Dr. Teena Hassan (2020-11-30)

RUSTlab Lectures @ RUSTlab (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), led by Estrid Sørensen
Development and Evaluation of a Lively Social Robot with Dr. Teena Hassan (2019-11-14)