Medical Assistance Systems
On October 30, André successfully defended his dissertation!
Congratulations, André! 🎓
We are delighted to share that André Groß has successfully defended his dissertation titled “Negation in Adaptive Robotic Scaffolding – Monitoring Human Understanding and Attention in Human–Robot Explanatory Tasks.”
In his work, André investigates how robots can support people through adaptive linguistic scaffolding—in particular through the strategic use of negation. He demonstrates that negation can create contrast and thereby deepen understanding, while also placing cognitive demands on users. With the model SHIFT, he presents an open, domain-independent framework that monitors human attention and understanding in real time and adapts explanations accordingly. Integrated into the RISE robot architecture, this enables adaptive, understanding-oriented explanatory behavior in practical human–robot interaction scenarios.
The dissertation was supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Britta Wrede and Dr.-Ing. Birte Richter. The examiners were Prof. Dr.-Ing. Britta Wrede and Prof. Dr. Matthias Rehm. The examination committee further included Prof. Dr. Klaus Neumann and Dr. Olga Abramov.
The dissertation was carried out within the Collaborative Research Centre/Transregio 318 “Constructing Explainability”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
The entire research group warmly congratulates André on this outstanding achievement and wishes him all the best for the future! 🚀