Mehdi Hellou

Researcher in Robotics and AI · Research Fellow, COROLAB, University of Manchester

Theory of Mind Social Robotics Human–Robot Interaction Reinforcement Learning Personalisation

My research focuses on improving social robot behaviours in real-world, human-centred environments by applying the premises of the Theory of Mind (ToM) to enable personalised interactions. This includes designing and testing computational architectures for ToM that consider each user’s differences and needs, tailoring the robot’s actions by exploiting Reinforcement Learning techniques such as Inverse Reinforcement Learning.

Currently

Research Fellow at the University of Manchester's Cognitive Robotics Lab (COROLAB), working within the EU's Horizon Europe programme PRIMI.

Selected publications

2025

Angelopoulos, G., Hellou, M., Vinanzi, S., Rossi, A., Rossi, S., & Cangelosi, A. (2025). Robot, did you read my mind? Modelling human mental states to facilitate transparency and mitigate false beliefs in human-robot collaboration. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 15(1), 1–29.

DOI

@article{angelopoulos2025robot,
  title = {Robot, did you read my mind? Modelling human mental states to facilitate transparency and mitigate false beliefs in human-robot collaboration},
  author = {Angelopoulos, Georgios and Hellou, Mehdi and Vinanzi, Samuele and Rossi, Alessandra and Rossi, Silvia and Cangelosi, Angelo},
  journal = {ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction},
  volume = {15},
  number = {1},
  pages = {1--29},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1145/3737890}
}

2025

Hellou, M., Angelopoulos, G., Vinanzi, S., Rossi, A., Rossi, S., & Cangelosi, A. (2025). Can you handle the truth? The effects of robots correcting users’ misalignment on trust and perceived social competence. 2025 34th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2410–2417.

Link

@inproceedings{hellou2025truth,
  title = {Can you handle the truth? The effects of robots correcting users' misalignment on trust and perceived social competence},
  author = {Hellou, Mehdi and Angelopoulos, Georgios and Vinanzi, Samuele and Rossi, Alessandra and Rossi, Silvia and Cangelosi, Angelo},
  booktitle = {2025 34th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)},
  pages = {2410--2417},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11217739}
}

All publications →

About me

I was previously an Early-Stage Researcher and PhD student at the University of Manchester, working on the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Networks project PERSEO, under the supervision of Prof. Angelo Cangelosi and Dr. Samuele Vinanzi. My passion for robotics led me to complete a Master of Engineering in Robotics from Polytech Sorbonne University, followed by a Master’s in Computer Science at Sorbonne University Pierre and Marie Curie. More about me →