Biography

I am a Ph.D. Candidate in The Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. My advisors are Illah Nourbakhsh and David Wettergreen.

I received my Master's degree in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in December 2005.

In May 2003, I graduated from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis with a B.S. degree in Computer Science and a minor in Anthropology. As an undergraduate research assistant, I worked primarily with Nikos Papanikolopoulos and Maria Gini.

My curriculum vitae is available in PDF format here.

Research Interests

I am primarily interested in human-robot interaction; in particular, how people and robots can build common ground--shared knowledge and awareness that that knowledge is shared. The major contribution of my thesis is Robot-Proxy Grounding, an application of common ground theory which focuses on promoting common ground between people and robots who are collaborating on an exploration task.

As a foundation for my thesis, I have participated in two different robotics projects: the Life in the Atacama project, in which scientists use a semi-autonomous rover to search for life in the Atacama Desert; and the Personal Exploration Rover project, which developed a robot (the Personal Exploraton Rover) intended for use by the general public at science centers across the United States.

As an undergraduate research assistant at the University of Minnesota, I worked on several different research projects. I spent most of my time working with the Scouts, miniature robots that are part of a distributed control system. I was also able to do some research in intelligent transportation, and I created a computer game designed to make learning Japanese characters fun for beginning Japanese students.

Please visit my research and publications pages for more information.

Contact Info

Email:
The most efficient way to reach me is by email. (I share my office phone with several other students, and the phone line does not have a voice mailbox.)

Office:
Smith Hall 201
Phone: (412) 268-8813
Fax: (412) 268-5571

Snail Mail:
Kristen N. Stubbs
Smith Hall 201
The Robotics Institute
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

If you need to know my home address and phone number, feel free to send me an email. If you are at CMU, you can find out my personal contact information by running the command finger kristen.stubbs from a Unix or Linux command-line prompt on an SCS or Andrew machine.