← all projects

research / 2023-2026 / demos and studies

Nadine in the field: public demos and user studies

Live demos at UN summits, a bank, schools and a TV studio, and two user studies with 123 participants.

Hangyeol Kang standing next to the robot Nadine while a visitor talks to her with a microphone at an ITU event in Geneva
At an ITU event in Geneva: a visitor talks to Nadine while I stand by. Faces of visitors are blurred.
result
12 public demos, 2 journal papers
role
Live demos, presenting to the public, study design and analysis
skills
Public speaking, science communication, experimental design, statistics
  • 12public demonstrations, 2023 to 2026
  • 50,000+combined attendance of the events where Nadine was shown
  • 2journal papers from the studies
  • 123participants across two user studies

Building a conversational robot is one job. Keeping it running in front of a live audience, and finding out whether people want to talk to it, is another. The technical side is on the platform page.

Live demonstrations

A live demo has no second take: unknown network, loud room, people interrupt and ask anything. That pressure shaped the demo version of the platform.

Nadine meets the robot Sophia, AI for Good Global Summit 2023.
AI for Good 2025: a visitor asks a question in front of the crowd. At the end, the operator screen with the perception layer tracking faces.
Children and families crowd around Nadine's booth at the Exhibition of Inventions in Geneva
Exhibition of Inventions Geneva, 2026.
Press and delegates around a row of robots, with Nadine in the foreground, at ITU
Press and delegates at ITU, 2023. Nadine in the foreground.
Nadine in front of the AI for Good banner
AI for Good.

Faces of visitors are blurred.

When Event Event attendance
Mar 2026 International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva, Palexpo 30,000+ visitors
Sep 2025 ICAO 42nd Assembly, Montreal (remote demo) nearly 3,000 delegates
Sep 2025 Essentials of Finance, Banque Cantonale de Genève (BCGE)
Sep 2025 Léman Bleu TV, Cosmopolis: I was a guest on the episode about AI for the common good (in French, from about 18:00) broadcast
Jul 2025 AI for Good Global Summit 2025, ITU 11,000+ participants, 169 countries
Jun 2025 Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, UNDRR 3,000+ in person
Mar 2025 Generative AI and the Future of Work, International Organisation of Employers
Jan 2025 The Innovation Debate, Geneva Innovation Movement
Nov 2024 Elargis tes Horizons, Geneva 400 schoolgirls
Jul 2024 Computer Graphics International 2024 (Best Technical Demo Award)
May 2024 AI for Good Global Summit 2024, ITU about 2,500 in person
Jul 2023 ITU High-level Segment
Jul 2023 AI for Good Global Summit 2023, ITU. Covered by Reuters (video with Prof. Nadia Magnenat Thalmann) 2,500+ in person

Attendance is each organizer’s published total for the whole event, not a count of people who met the robot. Empty cells are smaller events without a published figure.

Two user studies

The humanoid robot Nadine seated at the table used for the one-on-one study
Study 1. Participants were told to "feel free to ask her anything"; I stepped behind a screen and the robot ran on its own. Ethics approval from the University of Geneva.
A student sits across the table from Nadine and talks with her while other students watch, faces blurred
Study 2. One student talks with Nadine across the table while the group watches. Faces are blurred, as in the published paper.
Study 1: what makes people come back? Study 2: teenagers, sci-fi and a real robot
Where and when Main lobby of the University of Geneva, five days, November 2024 With Geneva’s Department of Public Instruction, one week, February 2025
Participants 68 adults, aged 18 to 34, English or French 55 students, aged 16 to 21, French
Design One-on-one conversation, no script, no operator. Questionnaires before and after, then regression Three measurements: baseline, after four days of sci-fi films, after meeting the robot (PANAS, Technology Acceptance Model)
Finding Talking made the robot seem more pleasant and less creepy, but what predicted wanting to return was how interesting and natural the conversation felt. Human-likeness did not Films made students more nervous about robots; meeting the real one brought that back to baseline. Curiosity dropped, acceptance stayed stable
So what Invest in conversation quality first; human-like styling is a complement A good first impression is not a success criterion on its own
Published International Journal of Social Robotics, 2026 The Visual Computer, 2025

What I took from it

  • Treating a demo as a production deployment: rehearsal, fallbacks, and a system that recovers on its own.
  • Explaining a technical system to ministers, bankers, teenagers and journalists.
  • Designing an experiment, getting it through ethics review, running it with the public, and doing the statistics.