Katharina Biernacka is a PhD student in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) with a focus on robotics-supported language support in elementary school. The aim of her research is to support language-poor children in an age-appropriate and future-oriented way by developing robots from monotonous, instructive systems into interesting, dialog-capable language partners.

Her work focuses on language development through shared storytelling. She investigates how conversational AI, adaptive dialog strategies and narrative interaction models can be used in social robots to actively encourage children to tell, develop and reflect on stories independently. A particular focus is on the reduction of repetitive interaction patterns, the dynamization of robotic language and the technical design of long-term motivating human-robot interactions in a school context.