About Me
I am currently a research scientist at Georgia Tech Research Institute working in the ATAS Lab. Previously I was a graduate student studying under Dr. Ron Arkin as part of the Mobile Robot Lab within the College of Computing.
I grew up in North Olmsted Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. I began my academic career at Northwestern University graduating with a Bachelor's degree in Psychology. After that, I worked for a bit as an editorial assistant for a financial magazine. I first returned to academia as a member of the research and development team at MIT's genome center helping to sequence the human genome. It was there, building robotic liquid handling systems, that I became interested in AI and robotics. Later I went on to work with production robots at Speedline and commercial software at Symantec while concurrently completing a Master's degree in Computer Science at Boston University. After completing the degree I taught at BU for a year before matriculating at Georgia Tech. I have a wonderful family.
My research focuses on developing the theoretical underpinnings necessary for human-robot social relations. My goal is to build robots that can not only interact with humans, but are also capable of representing, reasoning, and developing relationships with others.
Research Interests
I believe that the search for intelligence is the heart of AI. The research of AI patriarchs like Turing and Minsky has often centered on the challenge of defining and imbuing intelligence with respect to a machine. Recent AI research has (sadly in my opinion) neglected this original quest and taken a more pragmatic approach to AI. This de novo approach to AI emphasizes systems engineering and iterative improvement of machine performance. I think that it is important for AI to return to its roots and renew its commitment to the purpose of using computers to understand and recreate intelligence in a machine. This is my overarching research theme.
I am also interested in AI and HRI methodology. In particular, I am interested in developing repeatable, falsifiable methods to explore human-robot relations.
Research Projects
Representing Social Interaction
- Abstract: Can social interaction be represented computationally? It not, then what hope does the field of human-robot interaction have for success?
If so, then what should such a representation look like? This project explores that problem.
[Project Webpage]
Human-Robot Relationship Development
- Abstract: Interpersonal relations accrete from continued interactions among two people. This project seeks to understand, characterize, and
provide computational tools for relationship building in articial systems.
[Project Webpage]
Representing and Reasoning about Trust
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Abstract: Trust is a vital aspect of interpersonal relations. With respect to relationships among humans and machines trust has the
potential to play an important role in allowing both the human and the robot to consider acting in ways that would not be possible without trust. We
explore this topic from both the role of the trustor and the trustee.
[Project Webpage]
Robot Deception
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Abstract: The purpose of this project is to investigate and develop a better understanding of the phenomena of deception as it relates to robots and agents. Using a definition of deception
from biology as a starting place, we begin to tackle the question of how to represent and reason about social situations from the perspective of a deceptive robot. First we explore and develop methods
that allow a robot to determine if a situation warrants the use of deception. Next, we establish a method for acting deceptively. This page has also been translated into Romanian
View
this page in Romanian courtesy of azoft
[Project Webpage]
Using Stereotypes to Reason about Interaction
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Abstract: The goal of this project is to understand and develop methods that will allow an interactive robot to use generic models of its interactive partner to
bootstrap the process of learning about a new partner.
[Project Webpage]
Publications
Dissertation
- Alan R. Wagner (2009). "The Role of Trust and Relationships in Human-Robot Social Interaction." [pdf]
Journal Articles
- Ronald Arkin, Patrick Ulam, and Alan R. Wagner (2012). "Moral Decision-making in Autonomous Systems: Enforcement, Moral Emotions, Dignity, Trust and Deception." Proceedings of the IEEE [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner and Ronald C. Arkin (2010). "Acting Deceptively: Providing Robots with the Capacity for Deception." International Journal of Social Robotics, 3, pp. 5-26. The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com. [pdf].
- Alan R. Wagner and Ronald C. Arkin (2008). "Analyzing Social Situations for Human-Robot Interaction." Interaction Studies, 10(2). [pdf]
Conference Papers
- Alan R. Wagner (2012). "Using Cluster-based Stereotyping to Foster Human-Robot Cooperation" Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2012). Vilamoura, Portugal, 2012. [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner (2012). "The Impact of Stereotyping Errors on a Robot's Social Development" Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-EpiRob 2012). San Diego, CA, 2012. [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner and Ronald C Arkin (2011). "Recognizing Situations that Demand Trust." Proceedings of the 20th International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2011). Atlanta, GA. [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner and Ronald C Arkin (2009). "Robot Deception: Recognizing when a Robot Should Deceive." Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation (CIRA 2009). Daejeon, South Korea. [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner (2009). "Creating and Using Matrix Representations of Social Interaction." Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2009). San Diego, CA. [pdf]
- Patrick Ulam, Yoichiro Endo, Alan R. Wagner, Ronald C. Arkin (2007). "Integrated Mission Specification and Task Allocation for Robot Teams-Design and Implementation." Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2007). Rome, Italy. [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner and Ronald C Arkin (2006). "A Framework for Situation-based Social Interaction." Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN 2006). Hatfield, United Kingdom. [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner, Yoichiro Endo, Patrick Ulam, Ronald C. Arkin (2006). Multi-Robot User Interface Modeling. In Distributed Autonomous Robotics Systems 7. M. Gini and R. Voyles (eds.). Tokyo, Japan, Springer-Verlag. [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner and Ronald C Arkin (2004) "Multi-Robot Communication-Sensitive Reconnaissance." Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2004). New Orleans, LA, USA. [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner and Ronald C Arkin (2003) "Internalized Plans for Communication-Sensitive Robot Team Behaviors." Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003). Las Vegas, NV, USA. [pdf]
Technical Reports
- Alan R. Wagner, Ronald C. Arkin (2010) "Acting Deceptively: Providing Robots with the Capacity for Deception" Technical report GIT-GVU-10-01, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology [pdf]
- Patrick Ulam, Yoichiro Endo, Alan R. Wagner, Ronald C. Arkin (2007) "Integrated Mission Specification and Task Allocation for Robot Teams - Part 2: Testing and Evaluation,Analyzing Social Situations for Human-Robot Interaction." technical report GIT-GVU-07-02, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology [pdf]
Workshops (refereed)
- Alan Wagner (2013). "Developing Robots that Recognize when they are being Trusted" AAAI Spring Symposium, Stanford University. [pdf]
- Paul Robinette, Alan Wagner, Ayanna Howard (2013). "Building and Maintaining Trust Between Humans and Guidance Robots in an Emergency" AAAI Spring Symposium, Stanford University. [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner(2011). "Outcome Matrix based Phrase Selection" AAAI Fall Symposium, Washington DC. [pdf]
- Ronald C. Arkin, Alan R. Wagner, Brittany Duncan (2009). "Responsibility and Lethality for Unmanned Systems: Ethical Pre-mission Responsibilty Advisement" Proceedings of the ICRA 2009 Workshop on RoboEthics, Kobe, Japan. [pdf]
- Alan R. Wagner (2008). "A Representation for Interaction" Proceedings of the ICRA 2008 Workshop: Social Interaction with Intelligent Indoor Robots (SI3R). Pasadena, CA, USA. [pdf]
Abstracts (refereed)
- Alan R. Wagner (2010). "Using Stereotypes to Understand Ones Interactive Partner" Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), Extended Abstract. Toronto, Canada. [pdf]
CV
[pdf]
Software
[Software]