Hannah Pelikan studies human-robot interaction. She co-leads the Autonomous Systems and Robotics in Society Research group and collaborates with the Swedish Transport Agency, the City of Stockholm and the Urban Robotics Foundation on the regulation and standardization of public mobile robots. Before completing her Ph.D. in language and culture at Linköping University (2023), she studied interaction technology engineering and cognitive science in the Netherlands and Germany. Pelikan was a postdoctoral fellow in the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program – Humanity and Society (WASP-HS) and held affiliations with the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham (UK) and the Department of Information Science at Cornell University (USA).

Pelikan’s work lies at the intersection of sociological ethnomethodology and linguistic conversation analysis (EMCA), and human-computer interaction. She contributes an empirical understanding of how people interact with robots by capturing video recordings of robots in everyday interactions, such as in her award-winning paper “Encountering Autonomous Robots on Public Streets” (Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2024). Pelikan publishes in the humanities as well as in computer science outlets. Recent publications include “When a Robot Comes to Life: The Interactional Achievement of Agency as a Transient Phenomenon” (Social Interaction. Video-Based Studies of Human Sociality, 5 (3), 2023); and “Making Sense of the Felt Experience of Controlling Autonomous Systems” (Proceedings of the ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 2026).

In her Pro Futura Scientia project, Pelikan studies robots in public settings with a particular focus on the humans that make systems (appear to be) autonomous. Her work advances interactional and embodied theories of human sociality and artificial intelligence and develops methods for ethnomethodological interaction design.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.