CITRIS People and Robots hosts a weekly seminar series every Monday afternoon jointly with UC Berkeley’s “Design of Robotics and Embedded systems, Analysis, and Modeling” Seminars (DREAMS).

SPEAKER: Marynel Vazquez

ZOOM: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/97238125697

BIO: Marynel Vazquez is an Assistant Professor in Yale’s Computer Science Department, where she leads the Yale Interactive Machines Group (IMG). Her main area of research is Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). An updated list of her publications can be found here and in Google Scholar.

Before Yale, Vazquez was a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab working on the JackRabbot project. She closely collaborated with Disney Research while she was a Ph.D. student in the Robotics Institute (RI) at Carnegie Mellon University, and worked on assisted photography while pursuing her M.S. degree at the RI as well. Even before then, Vazquez built and learned how to fly a remote controlled helicopter! This allowed her to work on video stabilization for my bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering at Universidad Simón Bolívar.

Vasquez studies fundamental problems to enable group human-robot interactions. For instance, her work investigates social group phenomena in HRI, including spatial patterns of behavior typical of group conversations and group conformity. Further, she works on advancing autonomous, social robot behavior, both in terms of perception and decision making. An example is her work on social robot navigation. She also enjoys building robotic systems to demonstrate ideas in practice (Chester, Shutter). More details about her research can be found in her lab’s website.