I am a postdoctoral researcher at University of California, San Diego working with Prof. Laurel D. Riek as a part of the Healthcare Robotics Lab.
I completed my PhD in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor advised by Prof. John E. Laird as a part of the Soar lab.
pramaraj (at) ucsd (dot) edu
My area of research is Human-Robot Interaction. My research interests lie at the intersection of Human-Robot Interaction, Cognitive Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics. During my postdoc, I am studying robot roles and improving interaction in a multi-human robot scenario where groups of people and a robot function as a team towards a task.
In my PhD, my focus was on studying non-expert mental models of Interactive Task Learning (ITL) robots in a situated teaching interaction setting. I conducted human participant studies to understand how humans engage in hierarchical task teaching interactions with an ITL robot. I also focused on uncovering the role of robot failures on a non-expert’s mental model of the robot.
News
- October 2023: I started as a postdoc at the Healthcare Robotics Lab at the University of California, San Diego.
- August 2023: I successfully defended my dissertation!
- August 2021: Attending RO-MAN 2021 to present our work on Unpacking Human Teachers' Intentions For Natural Interactive Task Learning.
- June 2021: I gave a talk at the 41st Soar Workshop describing my intended thesis direction.
- March 2021: Super thrilled to be a part of the HRI Pioneers '21 cohort and present a poster at my first ever HRI conference!
- February 2021: Excited to be attending the AAAI Doctoral Consortium and presenting a poster at the AAAI-21 conference!
- August 2020: Attending the online ACS 2020 workshop and serving as the technical chair.
- July 2020: Our paper on understanding human teaching intentions to design ITL robots was accepted to the RSS 2020 AI+ACR workshop.
- May 2020: Excited to start my remote internship with the System Sciences lab at PARC!
- August 2019: Attending ACS 2019 (August 2-5) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- July 2019: Our paper Towards using transparency mechanisms to build better mental models was accepted to the 7th Goal Reasoning Workshop at ACS 2019!
- May 2019: I gave a talk at the 39th Soar Workshop presenting results from my internship project.
- April 2019: Participating in the 2019 CRA-W Grad Cohort Workshop (April 12-13) in Chicago.
- June 2018: Our extended abstract Establishing Common Ground with Learning Robots was accepted to the RSS 2018 workshop on Models and Representations for Natural Human-Robot Communication!
- May 2018: I gave a talk at the 38th Soar workshop presenting results from a recent pilot study. (slides)
- Feb 2018: I will be working as a research intern at Intel Labs, Santa Clara this summer!
- Oct 2017: My research is once again funded by Intel Corporation for FY 2017!
- June 2017: I gave a talk at the 37th Soar workshop on my current research project. (slides)
- July 2016: My research is funded by Intel Corporation for FY 2016.
- June 2016: I gave a talk at the 36th Soar workshop. (slides)