PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Angelica Lim

Angelica Lim is an AI roboticist who builds software for robots to interact with social intelligence and empathy. She studied computing science at Simon Fraser and informatics at Kyoto, then coauthored a method for expressive robot movement and worked on Pepper. At SFU she co-directed the Invent the Future AI Scholars Program, and her Gesture2Vec paper won the 2022 IROS Best Paper Award on Cognitive Robotics. As of October 2026, she is an Associate Professor Practitioner and Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Simon Fraser, where she leads the ROSIE Lab.

Works
84
Citations
772
h-index
15
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2008–2014

    Degrees at SFU and Kyoto

    At SFU she earns a B.Sc. in Computing Science in 2008; at Kyoto University she earns an M.Sc. in Informatics in 2012 and a Ph.D. in Informatics in 2014.

  2. 2011

    Emotion into robot movement

    In 2011, Lim, Tetsuya Ogata, and Hiroshi G. Okuno present DESIRE, a framework that links emotional voice with humanoid-robot movement through speed, intensity, regularity, and extent.

  3. 2014

    The Pepper robot project

    In 2014, Lim is a key member of the Pepper humanoid-robot project with SoftBank and Aldebaran Robotics.

  4. 2020

    Co-leading an AI scholars program

    In 2020, Lim is program co-director and a computing science professor for SFU's Invent the Future AI Scholars Program. Its goals include building community, meeting role models, gaining AI expertise, and developing a portfolio project.

  5. 2022

    Gesture2Vec wins at IROS

    In 2022, Gesture2Vec wins the IROS Best Paper Award on Cognitive Robotics, with Lim, Payam Jome Yazdian, and Mo Chen as authors. The paper clusters co-speech gestures using representation learning.

  6. February 2026

    Empathy for language agents

    In February 2026, Lim coauthors Your Robot Will Feel You Now: Empathy in Robots and Embodied Agents, a review of empathy research in robots and embodied agents that applies lessons to language-based agents such as ChatGPT.

  7. As of October 2026

    Leading the SFU ROSIE Lab

    As of October 2026, she is an Associate Professor Practitioner, Rajan Family Scholar, Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and Amii Fellow in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. She leads the SFU ROSIE Lab, which builds artificial intelligence software for robots to interact with social intelligence and empathy.

Career

  1. Since 2020Simon Fraser UniversityComputing Science Professor and Program Co-Director

Education

  1. 2014Kyoto UniversityPh.D. in Informatics
  2. 2012Kyoto UniversityM.Sc. in Informatics
  3. 2008Simon Fraser UniversityB.Sc. in Computing Science

From the biography and OpenAlex affiliations (the years of papers that list the organization), so some years are approximate.

Most-cited works

  1. UE-HRI: a new dataset for the study of user engagement in spontaneous human-robot interactions2017 · ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) · 98 citations
  2. A Deeper Look at Autonomous Vehicle Ethics: An Integrative Ethical Decision-Making Framework to Explain Moral Pluralism2021 · Frontiers in Robotics and AI · 50 citations
  3. The MEI Robot: Towards Using Motherese to Develop Multimodal Emotional Intelligence2014 · IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development · 44 citations
  4. Towards expressive musical robots: a cross-modal framework for emotional gesture, voice and music2012 · EURASIP Journal on Audio Speech and Music Processing · 37 citations
  5. Gesture2Vec: Clustering Gestures using Representation Learning Methods for Co-speech Gesture Generation2022 · IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) · 36 citations

From OpenAlex, as of 18 October 2026.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Simon Fraser University. Our estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.
  2. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers rose from 3% to 32%Includes Simon Fraser University. We estimate where leading AI researchers worked when their most-cited papers appeared. The company share rose from 3% in 1975–1979 to 32% in 2020–2024.
  3. Stanford University trained or employed 27 of the 111 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Kyoto University. Stanford University trained or employed 27 of the 111 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and employment links for major-prize and best-paper winners.
  4. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI from 1961 to 2025, with a year-by-year chart.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Angelica Lim yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Angelica Lim angelicalim.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  2. Angelica Lim - School of Computing Science - Simon Fraser University sfu.ca. Checked 18 October 2026.
  3. Converting emotional voice to motion for robot telepresence waseda.elsevierpure.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  4. TEDxKL Human Roboticist Speaker Wonders: ‘What If Robots Have Feelings?’ vulcanpost.com. Checked 18 October 2026.
  5. SFU invent the future program reaches more students sfu.ca. Checked 18 October 2026.
  6. Award Winners – IROS 2022 iros2022.org. Checked 18 October 2026.
  7. Your Robot Will Feel You Now: Empathy in Robots and Embodied Agents arxiv.org. Checked 18 October 2026.