Matthias Scheutz, Ph.D. Ph.D.
Karol Family Applied Technology Professor
Director, Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory
Matthias Scheutz received a PhD degree in philosophy from the
University of Vienna and a joint Ph.D. in cognitive science and
computer science from Indiana University. He is the Karol Family
Applied Technology Professor of computer and cognitive science in the
Department of Computer Science at Tufts University in the School of
Engineering, and Director of the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory and
the HRI Masters and PhD programs. He has over 400 peer-reviewed
publications in artificial intelligence, artificial life, agent-based
computing, natural language understanding, cognitive modeling,
robotics, human-robot interaction and foundations of cognitive science.
His current research focuses on complex ethical cognitive robots with
natural language interaction, problem-solving, and instruction-based
learning capabilities in open worlds.
Evan Krause, MS
Senior Robotics Researcher, Lab Manager
Evan Krause received a MS degree in Applied Mathematics from the University of Washington.
He is a senior staff member in the HRI Lab and his current research interests include failure detection
and recovery, problem solving, and architecture development for robots in open worlds.
Ravenna Thielstrom
Associate Robotics Programmer
Ravenna Thielstrom received her BA from Swarthmore College in computer science and cognitive science and is now a staff member in the HRI Lab. Her current areas of research and interest within human-robot interaction include natural-language dialogues, belief and reasoning systems, explainability, and problem-solving in open-world environments.
Thomas Arnold, ABD
Research Associate
Thomas Arnold is a research associate at HRILab, whose work focuses on moral and social norms in human-robot interaction. His articles have addressed standards of explanation, verification, and supererogation in robotic decision-making, as well as the limits of moral dilemmas for their evaluation. He is currently researching the normative demands of care contexts on explicit reasoning and instructions for robots. He often represents HRILab in its partner role in the PartnershipAI (PAI), and in 2019 he served as co-organizer of “Coding Caring,” one of two studies commissioned by the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100). He assists in programming discussions of AI’s impact on culture and religion for the group AI and Faith, and he is completing a doctoral dissertation in Harvard’s Committee on the Study of Religion on appeals to experience in the philosophy of religion. He is the co-author of “Ethics for Psychologists: A Casebook Approach” (Sage 2011).
Michael Jahn, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist
Michael Jahn received his Ph.D. degree in Mathematics
from the University of Wisconsin - Madison
where he specialized in computability theory.
He is now a research staff member of the HRI Lab.
His current research interests include
applications of mathematical logic in AI and robotics,
probabilistic logics, relationships between
material implication and probabilistic conditionals,
and hybrid symbolic-subsymbolic systems.
Thuan Nguyen, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Scholar
Thuan Nguyen received a B.S. degree in electrical engineering (honors program) from the Post and Telecommunication Institute of Technology, Vietnam, and a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Oregon State University, USA. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Tufts University, USA. His research interests include information theory, signal processing, and machine learning.
Tyler Frasca, Ph.D.
Research Scientist
Tyler Frasca received a joint PhD in Human-Robot Interaction and Computer
Science from Tufts University. His research focuses on improving robot
versatility by enabling them to learn tasks online from human instructions,
assess their expected task performance, and modify tasks online.
Marlow Fawn
Research Engineer
Marlow Fawn received their B.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Tufts in 2019, with a minor in computer science. They have been affiliated with the HRI lab since then, and hope to continue their studies in the fields of AI, cognitive architecture, and embodied systems.
Matthew McWilliams
Unity Programmer
Matt has worked as a software developer for over a decade for retail, non-profit and higher education clients as well as deploying AI-powered applications for public-sector and government customers. His work focuses on creating immersive VR simulation environments for learning and research. He received a BFA from Emerson College in 2009.
Theresa Law, ABD
Ph.D. Student
Theresa received her BA in cognitive science from Vassar College in 2018, and is set to graduate with a joint PhD in computer science and cognitive science from Tufts in summer, 2023. She will be starting as a tenure-track assistant professor of computer science at Bard College in September, 2023. She studies the human side of the human-robot interaction loop, with a specific focus on trust in human-robot interaction.
Ayca Aygun, MS
Ph.D. Student
Ayca Aygun is a Ph.D. student in the department of Computer Science. She received a B.S. degree in mathematical engineering and an M.S. degree in biomedical engineering from Istanbul Technical University, and an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University. She worked as a software and systems engineer for more than seven years. Her ongoing research focuses on offline and real-time cognitive state and team state prediction by exploring various physiological signal types including human gaze, EEG, and ECG with the help of different learning methodologies and statistical techniques.
Mitchell Abrams, MS
Ph.D. Student
Mitchell Abrams received his BA from Binghamton University in Linguistics and an MS in computational linguistics from Georgetown University. His former work in linguistics and natural language processing has touched on a broad range of topics, which include leveraging abstract meaning representation (AMR) for human-robot communication, creating annotated corpus resources for the Coptic language, and analyzing corpora within the forensic context. Mitchell has developed his skills at the US Army Research Laboratory and the Aston Institute of Forensic Linguistics (UK), where he was a visiting researcher. His current research in the human-robot interaction laboratory focuses on natural language understanding, reference resolution, and social norms.
Christopher Thierauf
Ph.D. Student
Chris Thierauf is currently pursuing a joint PhD in Computer Science and
Human-Robot Interaction after completing a bachelors in computer science
in 2020. His research work focuses on resiliency in open worlds: by
designing systems that use knowledge and reasoning to understand failure
and invent solutions, robots can better handle the chaos of human
environments.
Emeka Oguike
Ph.D. Student
Emeka is a PhD student in the computer science department at Tufts. He Received his B.S in Pure Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering at Tufts. His current research focuses on the unique roles object affordances and social norms play in modulating how prepositional utterances are understood.
Samuel Ryb, BA
Ph.D. Student
Sam researches how teaching machines to understand inference and related cues (such as pointing/gesturing and focal stress/intonation) can accelerate their ability to understand natural language commands. He received his BA from Cornell University, where he graduated magna cum laude.
Sarah Schneider, MS
Ph.D. Student
Sarah Schneider received a Bachelor and Master degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Technical University Graz
and she is currently doing her PhD in Computer Science at Tufts University.
Her research focuses on novelty detection and description
in computer vision tasks by incorporating semantic information.
Pierrick Lorang, MSc
Ph.D. Student
Pierrick Lorang holds a MSc in General Engineering - speciality Mechanics - from the University of Technology of Compiègne (UTC - Sorbonne Alliance). He has a background in various fields including mechanical engineering, robotics, computer science, nanotechnology and aerospace engineering. He is pursuing a joint PhD in Mechanical Engineering and Human-Robot Interaction at Tufts University in collaboration with the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT) in Vienna. His research focuses on problem solving, search, planning and acting in an open world. He is currently working on methods for online search and learning in partially known environments to improve the robustness of systems to all kinds of changes in the environment.
