I am a PhD student in Maja Mataric’s Interaction Lab at the University of Southern California. I am driven by the question - how can we use technology to bring people together rather than isolate them? I believe social robots may bring people out of the digital world and back together in the physical world. I currently focus on understanding the dynamics of multi-party interaction between groups of people and a robot. You can read more about this work here.

As part of this work I spend most of my time developing deep learning models for understanding and predicting human behavior in order to support more intelligent interactions.

Current Work

I am funded on the NSF Expeditions in Computing Grant for Socially Assistive Robotics for Children. I am also supporting new work on developing a mixed reality framework for facilitating robot integration and customization in human-robot interaction as part of the NSF NRI 2.0 Grant.

My work on using a robot mediator to facilitate trust between students in a support group setting has recently been accepted for publication at ICRA 2020. You can find the preprint of that work here.

I am currently developing a novel method for allowing a robot to predict turn taking in group conversations. More details on this work will be available soon.

I am also developing a platform agnostic, ROS-based framework for composing and controlling interactions in human-robot interactions. If you would like to learn more or contribute to this project you can find out more here.

Personal Info

I hail from the Pacific Northwest. Like a good Washingtonian I love to spend my spare time hiking and rock climbing. I graduated from Gonzaga University with a degree in Electrical Engineering. I recieved a master’s in research in Robotics and Autonomous Systems from the University of Bristol while on a Marshall Scholarship. I love to travel and have been fortunate that work and education have allowed me to live across the US and Europe. If you want to connect please don’t hesitate to reach out!