Research Interests
Human-Robot Interaction
Research Statement
Andrea L. Thomaz is an Associate Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She directs the Socially Intelligent Machines lab, which is affiliated with the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines (IRIM). She earned a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from
the University of Texas at Austin in 1999, and Sc.M. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT in 2002 and 2006. Dr. Thomaz has published in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Human-Robot Interaction. She received an ONR Young Investigator Award in 2008, and an NSF CAREER award in 2010. Her work
has been featured in the New York Times, on NOVA Science Now, she was named one of MIT Technology Review?s TR 35 in 2009, and on Popular Science Magazine?s Brilliant 10 list in 2012. The vision of Dr. Thomaz? research is to enable robots to function in real human environments; such as,
service robots helping at home, co-worker robots to revolutionize manufacturing, and assistive robots empowering healthcare workers and enabling aging adults to live longer in their homes. These robots
will need to interact with end users in order to learn what they need to do on-the-job. To this end, the research in Thomaz? lab aims to computationally model mechanisms of human social learning in order to build robots and other machines that are intuitive for people to teach.
