Biography
Dr. Carl Strathearn is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Data Science, AI, and Software Engineering at Edinburgh Napier University, and a leading researcher in embodied artificial intelligence and realistic humanoid robotics. His research mission: create assistive social humanoid robots that appear, function, and interact like humans, making state-of-the-art AI accessible to everyone—especially people with health conditions requiring social support. Carl's breakthrough work includes developing a machine learning algorithm for robotic lip sync that generates real-time speech visemes from audio, named one of BBC Science's Top 13 Scientific Moments of 2021. He built Baudi, a fully automated 3D-printed humanoid with eyes that dilate to light and emotion using a novel gelatine artificial muscle trained on human pupillary data, and Euclid, a social robot with automatic speech recognition, computer vision, generative AI, and skin sensors designed for older adult care. Carl's robots combine mechanical realism with embodied AI: pupils expand or shrink based on facial expression sentiment analysis and ambient light, mimicking human autonomic responses. His work has been featured in The Guardian, BBC, and the World Economic Forum, and he consults for UK Government and businesses on humanoid robot deployment. Carl holds a PhD on the Multimodal Turing Test for Realistic Humanoid Robots with Embodied AI from Staffordshire University (2020), and is currently conducting feasibility studies deploying humanoid robots in mental health wards. His philosophy: the human face is the most natural interface for communication—by replicating it, we increase accessibility and human connection.