- PhD Student
Alva Markelius is a PhD candidate and Cambridge Trust Scholar at the Affective Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory (AFAR) under the supervision of Professor Hatice Gunes. She is also recipient of Top 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics™ award 2024, committee chair of the Centre for Human Inspired AI Early Career Community and student steward for Better Images of AI. She is also Co-President of the Cambridge University Polo Club.
Her main research interests are the ethics of social AI and robotics, specifically in the intersection of embodied robotics and large language models. She is also interested in embodied cognition, affect and emotion, gender and intersectionality, global AI narratives and AI hype.
She obtained her MSt degree in AI Ethics & Society at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge while working as a research engineer at the DICE - lab at the Institution for Applied IT, University of Gothenburg. She received her bachelor degree in cognitive science at the University of Gothenburg and Seoul National University where she specialised in AI and robotics.
Themes
Publications
Rutar, D., Markelius, A., Schellaert, W., Hernández-Orallo, J., & Cheke, L. (2025). General interaction battery: Simple object navigation and affordances (GIBSONA). Cognitive Systems Research, 101411. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogsys.2025.101411
Markelius, A. & Gunes, H. (2025). Social Robotics and Large Language Models for Disability: A Scoping Review. PREPRINT available at Research Square. https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7260703/v1
Laban, G., Hough, J., Lee, M., Markelius, A., Foster, M. E., Stuart-Smith, J., & Ahmad, M. I. (2025). Bias and Fairness in Conversational User Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Conversational User Interfaces (pp. 1-8). https://doi.org/10.1145/3719160.3728629
Ravandi, B. S., Khan, I., Markelius, A., Bergström, M., Gander, P., Erzin, E., & Lowe, R. (2025). Exploring task and social engagement in companion social robots: a comparative analysis of feedback types. Advanced Robotics, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/01691864.2025.2526668
Markelius, A., Lou, Y., Galazka, M., Lundgren, S., Zemblys, R., Lind, H., & Lowe, R. (2025). Investigating the Mitigation of Stress in Autonomous and Non-autonomous Vehicles Using LLM Feedback. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 108-127). Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland.
Markelius, A., Bailey, J., Gibson, J. L., & Gunes, H. (2025). Stakeholder Perspectives on Whether and How Social Robots Can Support Mediation and Advocacy for Higher Education Students with Disabilities. arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.16499. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16499
Rutar, D., Markelius, A., Cheke, L. G., Hernández-Orallo, J. (2025). Cognitive Science-Inspired Evaluation of Core Capabilities for Object Understanding in AI. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2503.21668
Markelius, A. (2025). An Empirical Design Justice Approach to Identifying Ethical Considerations in the Intersection of Large Language Models and Social Robotics. in Philipp Hacker (ed.), Oxford Intersections: AI in Society (Oxford, online edn, Oxford Academic, 20 Mar. 2025), https://doi.org/10.1093/9780198945215.003.0013
Zokaei, N., Kjeldsen, P., Havild, N., Dong, M., Markelius, A., Bergstrom, M., … Blicher, J. (2024). ACTnow: Computerised cognitive training for Mild Cognitive Impairment. osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/v3g84
Vivas, A. B., Estévez, A. F., Khan, I., Roldán-Tapia, L., Markelius, A., Nielsen, S., & Lowe, R. (2024). DigiDOP: A framework for applying digital technology to the Differential Outcomes Procedure (DOP) for cognitive interventions in persons with neurocognitive disorders. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 105838. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105838
Markelius, A., Wright, C., Kuiper, J., Delille, N., Kuo, Y.T. (2024) The Mechanisms of AI Hype and its Planetary and Social Costs, Topical Collection on The Ethical Implications of AI Hype: Examining the overinflation and misrepresentation of AI capabilities and performance, Springer Nature AI & Ethics: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-024-00461-2
Markelius, A., Sjöberg, S., Bergström, M., Ravandi, B.S., Vivas, A.B., Khan, I., Lowe, R.: (2023), Differential Outcomes Training of Visuospatial Memory: A Gamified Approach Using a Socially Assistive Robot. International Journal of Social Robotics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-023-01083-0
Markelius, A., Sjöberg, S., Lemhauori, Z., Cohen, L., Bergström, M., Lowe, R., Cañamero, L., (2023), A Human-Robot Mutual Learning System with Affect-Grounded Language Acquisition and Differential Outcomes Training. International Conference on Social Robotics 2023. Finalist for Best Paper Award. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-8718-4_10
Chan, A., Salganik, R., Markelius, A., Pang, C., Rajkumar, N., Krasheninnikov, D., ... & Maharaj, T. (2023). Harms from Increasingly Agentic Algorithmic Systems. In Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (pp. 651-666). https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594033
