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.
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.