I completed my PhD in May 2012 from the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. My interests are in Arificial Intelligence (AI), Human-Computer Interaction, and Robotics. More specifically, I'm interested in how intelligent systems can incorporate knowledge of humans into their action planning algorithms to increase their task performance. In my thesis, I studied how devices can model humans that are present in the environment to determine whether to ask for help, who to ask, and when, and to use human help to complete tasks more effectively (See some videos here). My advisors were Manuela Veloso and Anind Dey.

News and Recent Work

• Thesis Defense I successfully defended my thesis on April 23, 2012. You can find details here.
• CoBot Using the Elevator on Travel Channel CoBot and its ability to ask for help to use the elevator was featured on the Travel Channel's segment of Carnegie Mellon Robotics here. See other videos here.
• CoBot Deployment: CoBot has been successfully deployed for over a month now. Recently it brought candy to each room in Gates-Hillman (News Release for Halloween).
• Siebel Scholar: I am a 2012 Siebel Scholar, a fellowship awarded to 85 graduate students in the US annually.