Naoko is a Research Scientist in the UX and Ethnography team. She is a sociologist, specialising in social interaction and motion analysis, with a research focus in Robotics.

She obtained a PhD in Sociology from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris and a teaching certificate of Kinetography Laban from Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP).

In 2015, Naoko was a Postdoctoral Fellow within a humanoid robotics team at the Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems (LAAS-CNRS) in Toulouse, France. In 2016-2017, she was a Renault-Junior International Research Fellow at the France-Japan Foundation at EHESS. From 2018 to 2021 Naoko was a Research Fellow at the Sydney Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (SIRIS) at the University of Sydney, leading the research theme ‘Robotics and Society’.

Naoko joined Naver Labs Europe in 2022.

Her research interests include human-robot collaboration, motion-based human-robot interaction, and robot navigation in public spaces.

Publications (Google scholar)