Angelica Lim
About
Appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chair – 2025
Angelica Lim is an associate professor in the School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Director of the ROSIE Lab (Robots with Social Intelligence and Empathy). Her research envisions an AI future where machines understand and adapt to the richness of human communication. She develops artificial intelligence models of nonverbal communication, including facial expressions, body gestures and speech prosody, to build empathic, context-aware and compassionate machines. Her work is grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration with psychologists, cognitive scientists, clinicians and neuroscientists, advancing responsible and human-centered robotics. Dr. Lim has been featured by the BBC, TEDx, and Forbes’ 20 Leading Women in AI, and she hosted a television documentary on robotics.
Awards
- Best Demo Award, IEEE/ACM HRI (2023)
- Best Paper Award in Cognitive Robotics, IEEE IROS (2022)
- Excellence in Teaching Award, Simon Fraser University School of Computing Science (2021)
- CITEC Award for Excellence in HRI Doctoral Research, ACM HRI (2014)
- Best Paper Award in Entertainment Robots and Systems, IEEE IROS (2010)
Relevant Publications
- Lim, A., & Okuno, H. G. (2015). A recipe for empathy: Integrating the mirror system, insula, somatosensory cortex and motherese. International Journal of Social Robotics, 7(1), pp. 35-49.
- Yazdian, P. J., Chen, M., & Lim, A. (2022). Gesture2Vec: Clustering gestures using representation learning methods for co-speech gesture generation. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 3100-3107.
- Tuttosi, P., Hughson, E., Matsufuji, A., Zhang, C., & Lim, A. (2023). Read the room: Adapting a robot's voice to ambient and social contexts. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 3998-4005.
- Etesam, Y., Yalçın, Ö. N., Zhang, C., & Lim, A. (2024, October). Contextual emotion recognition using large vision language models. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 4769-4776.
- Tuttösí, P., Yeung, H. H., Wang, Y., Wang, F., Denis, G., Aucouturier, J. J., & Lim, A. (2024). Mmm whatcha say? uncovering distal and proximal context effects in first and second-language word perception using psychophysical reverse correlation. ISCA Interspeech