News

Allan defended his PhD thesis today! After some paperwork, he’ll be off to Japan to spend more time with robots.

Sam successfully defended her PhD! Its interview season, so we’re still waiting to see where she’ll be in the fall. She is now faculty at the Miner School of Computer & Information Sciences at UMass Lowell. Keep an eye out for updates on her website.

Kirabo successfully defended her PhD! She’ll be an Assistant Professor of Climate and Computer Science at Harvey Mudd College in the Fall of 2023.

Allan et al. have released our social navigation pedestrian dataset. This contains labels for 1412 pedestrians in 8 recording sessions, with six static cameras and one human-pushed cart providing a human perspective.

Zhi has successfully completed his PhD! He’s now a postdoc at Georgia Tech for the NSF AI Institute for Collaborative Assistance and Responsive Interaction for Networked Groups (AI-CARING).

Team members recently presented their work at CoRL and ASSETS. Allan Wang’s CoRL paper was also selected for an oral presentation (top 6.5%).

• CoRL (Oral): Wang, A., Mavrogiannis, C., & Steinfeld, A. Group-based Motion Prediction for Navigation in Crowded Environments.
• ASSETS Poster: Limprayoon, J. F., Pareek, P., Tan, X. Z., & Steinfeld, A. Robot Trajectories When Approaching a User with a Visual Impairment.

Team members have papers at three conferences this summer:

• DIS: Reig, S., Luria, M., Forberger, E., Won, I., Steinfeld, A., Forlizzi, J., & Zimmerman, J. Social Robots in Service Contexts: Exploring the Rewards and Risks of Personalization and Re-embodiment.
• SIGDIAL: Romero, O. J., Wang, A., Zimmerman, J., Steinfeld, A., & Tomasic, A. A Task-Oriented Dialogue Architecture via Transformer Neural Language Models and Symbolic Injection.
• IJCAI: Cui, Y., Koppol, P., Admoni, H., Niekum, S., Simmons, R., Steinfeld, A., & Fitzgerald, T. Understanding the Relationship between Interactions and Outcomes in Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning.

A paper titled “Perceptions of Agent Loyalty with Ancillary Users” led by Samantha Reig has been published in the International Journal of Social Robotics.

Qian Yang received a SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award for her thesis work with the lab. Her thesis focused on AI as a UX design material, an area she is continuing to explore as faculty at Cornell University.

Kirabo had two papers accepted recently. Look for them this spring!

• CHI: Kirabo, L., Carter, E. J., Barry, D., & Steinfeld, A. Priorities, technology, & power: Co-designing an inclusive transit agenda in Kampala, Uganda.
• AfriCHI: Kirabo, L., Namara, M., McNeese, N. The Power of the Blue Tick: Ugandans’ experiences and engagement onTwitter at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.