Prof. Luis Sentis. Lead PI. Professor in Aerospace Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. He directs the Human Centered Robotics Lab which focuses on devising technologies for our society to perform tasks alongside robots, tackling questions in design, control, human factors and automation. He holds PhD and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in Telecommunications Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia.
Prof. Keri K. Stephens. Co-PI. Professor in Organizational Communication Technology, a Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Co-Director of the Technology and Information Policy Institute in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. She has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications, published with over 70 different graduate students, and her two most recent books have won three national-level awards. In this GCR project she is leading projects focused on understanding human behavior when anticipating and encountering robots as well as our Team Science Project.
Dr. Maria Esteva. Senior Personnel. Research Scientist at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research on the design and evaluation of large-scale data curation applications in High Performance Computing environments is reflected in the Core Trust Seal Certified DesignSafe Data Depot and in the Digital Rocks Portal. In the Community Embedded Robotics project, she leads the creation of a convergence data model to integrate diverse datasets from the various human robot interaction studies. Dr. Esteva has a PhD in Information Science and an Advanced Certificate in Preservation Administration from the University of Texas at Austin.
Prof. Nanshu Lu. Senior Personnel. Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her B.Eng. with honors from Tsinghua University, Beijing, Ph.D. from Harvard University, and Beckman Postdoctoral Fellowship from UIUC. Her research concerns the mechanics, materials, manufacture, and human or robot integration of soft electronics.
Prof. Elliott Hauser (eah13@utexas.edu) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information. He is Co-PI and Informatics Lead of the NSF-funded Community Embedded Robotics project. He uses technical, theoretical, and participatory ethnographic methods in his work.
Prof. Justin Hart. Co-PI. Assistant Professor of Practice in Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. He directs the Living with Robots Laboratory which focuses on building robots that interact well with people and robots that operate in places designed for people. His research focuses on autonomous, social human-robot interaction and the artificial intelligence technologies that enable the development of interactive service robots, especially as deployed in the home and public spaces. He holds a PhD from Yale University, an MEng from Cornell University, and a BS from West Virginia University.
Prof. Joydeep Biswas‘ ultimate goal is to have self-sufficient autonomous mobile robots working in human environments, performing tasks accurately and robustly. In support of this goal, I am interested in research in perception, planning, and control applied to autonomous mobile robots. My research in perception involves developing models and representations for a dynamic world, and algorithms to build and perform inference based on such models. My interests in planning include motion planning, multi-robot coordination, and task-based planning in domains including service mobile robots, and robot soccer.
Prof. Samantha Shorey (Ph.D., University of Washington) is a design ethnographer who studies automated technologies — such as AI and robots — in the workplace. In her research, she seeks to highlight the labor and innovation of people who care for, calibrate, and correct emerging technologies once they are deployed into their environments.
Prof. Junfeng Jiao, an Associate Professor at The University of Texas at Austin, stands out in the field of urban planning with his roles as the founding director of the Urban Information Lab, director of Texas Smart Cities, director of the UT Ethical AI program, and a key figure in UT Austin’s Good Systems Grand Challenge. His research encompasses Smart Cities, Urban Informatics, and Ethical/Generative AI, leveraging various information technologies to explore urban infrastructure impacts on human behavior. His work includes over 110 peer-reviewed articles and two books.
Ryan Gupta. Ph.D Candidate in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. A member of the Human Centered Robotics Lab with focus on human centered search. This concept combines efficient viewpoint planning for visual search tasks like Search and Rescue or autonomous inspection with lessons learned from studying human response to coexisting in shared spaces with mobile robots. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Southern Methodist University.
Emily Norman. I am a Communication Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin, a Lead Graduate Research Assistant on an NSF Funded Growing Convergence Research grant about community-deployed autonomous robotics, and a member of the OPTIC Lab. I am also a part of the Ethical AI portfolio program, an interdisciplinary graduate program at the University of Texas in which students explore the innovation and societal impacts of Artificial Intelligence technology – supported by Good Systems, a UT Grand Challenge. My research interests lie primarily at the intersections of communication, scientific collaboration, and robotics, and I utilize both qualitative and quantitative methodology in my research.
Hyonyoung Shin is a Ph.D. Student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on developing non-invasive physiological sensors and decoders for novel human-robot and human-computer interface applications. He received his B.Eng. with honors in Bioengineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.
Yifan Xu is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Communication & Technology at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research concerns communicative practices in the space of technology and inquires how we can develop/implement technologies that are supportive of equitable and ethical outcomes.
Yao-Cheng Chan is a doctoral student at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include using mixed methods in Human-Robot Interaction and human behavior studies with eye-tracking. His role in this NSF project is to design and conduct HRI studies that focus on incidental Human-Robot Encounters.
Sadanand Modak graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi in 2022 with B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering. He worked on projects in diverse areas during his undergrad, which included kinematics and synthesis of robotic manipulators, multi-robot task allocation systems, computer vision, and development of soft robotic exosuit. He joined the PhD program in Computer Science at UT Austin thereafter in Fall 2022 and has been working as part of AMRL since then. His broad interests lie in the long-term autonomy of mobile robots with a focus on advancing current planning/navigation and perception systems to reduce human intervention and developing interpretable learning algorithms that go beyond “Big Data” techniques.
Zhiyun (Jerry) Deng is a first-year PhD student at The University of Texas at Austin, affiliated with Texas Robotics. His research is driven by a profound passion for exploring and integrating the realms of optimization, control, and machine learning to pioneer advancements in autonomous robotics systems, particularly in unstructured environments. He is honored to have his research supported by the UT Austin School of Engineering (SoE) Fellowship.