Andrea L. Thomaz is an Associate Professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She joined the faculty in 2007. 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. Andrea is published in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Human-Robot Interaction. She directs the Socially Intelligent Machines lab, which is affiliated with the Robotics and Intelligent Machines (RIM) Center and with the Graphics Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center.
Research
Her research aims to computationally model mechanisms of human social learning in order to build social robots and other machines that are intuitive for everyday people to teach.
Please see the Socially Intelligent Machines Lab webpage.
Selected Publications
Find a more complete listing (with pdfs) here.
- S. Chernova and A. L. Thomaz "Robot Learning from Human Teachers." Synthesis Lectures on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Morgan & Claypool Publishers, April 2014.
- M.J. Gielniak, C.K. Liu and A.L. Thomaz, "Generating human-like motion for robots." The International Journal of Robotics Research, Vol. 32, No. 11, pgs 1275-1301, 2013.
- C. Chao and A. L. Thomaz. "An autonomous controller for human-like turn-relinquishing." International Journal of Human-Robot Interaction, Vol. 1 No. 1, 2012.
- M. Cakmak, C. Chao, and A.L. Thomaz, "Designing Interactions for Robot Active Learners." in IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, 2010.
- A.L. Thomaz and M. Cakmak, "Learning about objects with human teachers." In Proceedings of the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2009.
Teaching
CS 7763: Human-Robot Interaction
(being offered Fall 2012, next offering will be 2014)
CS 3600: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
(full for Fall 2012, contact Prof. Thomaz about registration)
Honors and Awards
Popular Science Magazine, Brilliant 10 List, 2012.
Georgia Tech, College of Computing, Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award, 2011.
NSF CAREER award, 2010.
MIT Technology Review’s TR 35, 2009
ONR Young Investigator Award, 2008.