EMPLOYMENT

My research borrows heavily from social psychology, behavioral economics, and artificial intelligence focusing on higher, cognitive, aspects of human-robot socialization such as relationship development, modeling of one’s interactive partner, and reasoning about trust and deception. I utilize theories and methods from these fields to create robots that are capable of social interaction with an ordinary person in variety of different environments. My work has focused on the development of a framework based on social psychological and game theory that allows a robot to computationally represent its social interactions with a human. This framework has, in turn, led to insights into higher social phenomenon such as trust, deception, and stereotyping as well as computational methods that allow a robot to reason about whether a situation demands trust or warrants deception. With respect to applications, my primarily interested lies in the areas of healthcare and search and rescue. Our research on human-robot trust has, for example, focused on emergency evacuation scenarios in which a person must decide whether or not to follow a robot’s evacuation directions. Overall, my research strives to positively influence both the development of interactive robot and the people that choose to use those robots