About Me
I am currently a PhD student at Georgia Institute of Technology working 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 Turning 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.
Publications
Journal Articles
- 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 (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
- 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)
- 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]
Pictures
CV
[pdf]
Software
Forthcoming