I am a sixth year graduate student at Yale University pursuing a Ph.D. in Computer Science. I work with Brian Scassellati in the Social Robotics Lab. I am interested in human-robot interaction, artificial intelligence, and robot interactions with human-robot teams.
My research focuses on developing robots that improve the performance of human-robot teams by shaping team dynamics to promote inclusion, trust, and cohesion. Human social behavior in groups is richly interconnected and highly nuanced, presenting computational challenges for sensing group-level dynamics from individual behavior. I build robots that not only perceive these dynamics, but also positively influence the behavior of group members through social cues and verbal interaction.
I am currently looking and applying for tenure-track assistant professor positions. Here are links to generic versions of my research statement, teaching statement, and CV.
Featured Work
My recent work investigating strategies for the inclusion of human members in human-robot teams was recently accepted to the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2020). The two strategies I explored are: 1) a specialized role to interact with the robot and 2) supportive utterances from the robot. Check out the following video for more details on this work.
Recent News
11/30/19
My paper titled "Strategies for the Inclusion of Human Members within Human-Robot Teams" was accepted to the 15th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction in Cambridge, UK.
10/29/19
I participated in the 2019 Rising Stars in EECS Workshop hosted at the Univiersity of Illinois Urbana Champaign from October 29 to November 1, 2019.
10/06/19
I participated in the 2019 Dagstuhl Seminar on "Social Agents for Teamwork and Group Interactions from October 6 to 11, 2019.
06/21/19
I participated in the RSS Pioneers 2019 Workshop held in tandom with the Robotics: Sience and Systems (RSS) Conference June 21-26 in Freiburg, Germany.
04/01/19
My research on examining people's responses and reactions to robots that break their trust and try to repair the trust that was broken was featured in a New Scientist article titled Robot discovers that lying about a betrayal helps to rebuild trust.
03/12/19
I presented my paper examining the response of human participants to a robot's trust violation and subsequent repair at THe 14th Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction in Daegu, South Korea.
02/01/19
My colleague Aditi Ramachandran and I presented our paper describing our design of the Assistive Tutor POMDP (AT-POMDP) and evaluation with 5th grade stduents at the The Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19) in Honolulu, HI, USA.
