News

01 Dec 2022. HAI'22 and CORL'22 in New Zealand

New IMG work will appear at HAI'22 and CORL'22 this December. One publication, led by Kate Candon, is about how people perceive helping from an agent in a fast-paced and continuous interaction scenario. Another paper, led by Debasmita Ghose in the Yale Social Robotics Lab, is about learning visual object representations tailored to user requirements. Finally, new work on learning behavior policies for robots in groups will be presented by Sarah Gillet at a CORL workshop on aligning robot representations with humans. The latter effort is a collaboration between IMG and the KTH Division Robotics, Perception and Learning.

13 Nov 2022. New NeurIPS'22 paper on facilitating the training of neural network binary classifiers

Nathan Tsoi will be presenting our new NeurIPS paper this month: “Bridging the Gap: Unifying the Training and Evaluation of Neural Network Binary Classifiers”. See https://btg.yale.edu/ for more details.

08 Oct 2022. Northeast Robotics Colloquium (NERC) 2022

I presented our recent work in multi-party HRI at the NERC'22 event in Lowell, MA. Thanks to all of the organizers for such an inspiring event!

02 Sep 2022. Kayla's paper about Ommie wins Best Student Paper Award at RO-MAN'22!

Kayla Matheus, third year Yale PhD student, received the Best Student Paper award at the 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2022). Her paper presents Ommie, a novel robot that supports deep breathing practices for the purposes of anxiety reduction. This work is a collaboration between the Yale Social Robotics Lab and IMG.

12 Aug 2022. New RO-MAN'22, IEEE RA-L and HAI'22 papers

Three new papers will be presented by students in the upcoming months! First, Kayla Matheus will be presenting Ommie at RO-MAN'22 this August. Ommie is a new robot to help people practice deep breathing exercises. This work is a collaboration between the Social Robotics Lab at Yale and IMG. Second, Nathan Tsoi will be presenting SEAN 2.0 at IROS'22 in October (with the paper being officially published in the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters journal). This paper is a collaboration between IMG and the Intelligent Visual Interfaces Lab at Rutgers. Third, Kate Candon will be presenting a paper about human perceptions of the helpfulness of unexpected agent assistance at HAI'22. Congrats to all the authors!

11 Jun 2022. KTH-RPL Summer School in Sweden

I presented our recent work in multi-party HRI at the 2022 Summer School organized by the Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning of the KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Thanks to the organizing committee for putting together such a fun and enlightening event!

27 May 2022. ICRA Workshop on Social Robot Navigation: Advances and Evaluation

It was great to see the community come together both in-person and virtually for our Social Robot Navigation workshop! Thanks to everybody who contributed to making this event happen, including the event co-organizers (Abhijat Biswas, Nathan Tsoi, Allan Wang & Aaron Steinfeld) and undergrad collaborators (Gustavo Silvera, Peter Yu, Xiao (Ivy) He and Liyao Fu).

06 May 2022. Bethany's Girls Exploring Math and Science Program

Thanks to the Bethany Community School for inviting me to present our research to female students in grades four through six.

19 Apr 2022. NSF NRI-FRR PI Meeting

It's exciting to see the meeting finally take place after many months of planning and coordination efforts in collaboration with K. Bekris (Rutgers), E. Plaku (NSF), J. Wachs (NSF), F. King (Vanderbilt), and J. Gigax (Vanderbilt). Thanks to all other faculty, industry officials, and federal officials who are also contributing in many ways to the meeting.

04 Apr 2022. 2022 NSF FRR CAREER Award!

Thanks to NSF, we will keep working towards advancing group HRI, engaging the public with robotics and building a more diverse CS workforce.

05 Mar 2022. New HRI 2022 paper

Sarah Gillet will be presenting a collaborative project between IMG and KTH at HRI'22. The goal of the project is learning robot gaze policies for balancing participation in human groups.

07 Feb 2022. Social Navigation Symposium by Google+Stanford

Nathan Tsoi and I represented IMG at the symposium.

21 Jan 2022. Talk at Meta Research

I presented our recent work in group HRI at the Meta Embodied AI Seminar.

30 Nov 2021. AI Ethics on the Global Stage

Sasha Brown (DeepMind / Yale World Fellows Program), Wendell Wallach (Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics) and I participated in the first event of the Yale Kimball Smith Series.

29 Oct 2021. Talking Robotics

I presented our research in Group Human-Robot Interaction at the Talking Robotics series.

20 Jun 2021. New IMG work at CVPR 2021

This week, Kevin Chen will be presenting our latest work in vision-and-language navigation at CVPR and I gave a keynote presentation at the 2nd JRDB Workshop.

05 May 2021. New 2020 Amazon Research Award!

Our work on human-driven simulations receives support from Amazon.

05 Mar 2021. Our work is nominated for a Best Paper Award at HRI 2021!

Our paper about deploying robots during a pandemic was nominated for a Best Paper Award at HRI 2021, the top conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

16 Jan 2021. Bleep-Bloop-Bleep! Say 'Cheese,' Human

An article about IMG's robot photographer recently appeared in Yale News and was highlighted by the ACM TechNews.

04 Dec 2020. INFORMS en Español

I participated in the INFORMS speaker series, which aims to connect the hispanic community with researchers in the United States.