Curriculum Vitae

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Research Interests

My work focuses on machines that learn new tasks and goals from ordinary people in everyday human environments. This research works from the assumption that machines meant to learn from people can better take advantage of the ways in which people naturally approach teaching. My research works to understand and computationally model specific mechanisms of human social learning in order to build machines that participate in social learning interactions. This work has interconnected goals from Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer/Robot Interaction: improving the performance of a machine's learning behavior through attention to human interaction and improving the experience of the human teacher by designing interactive learning algorithms based on how people teach. This work spans the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Human-Computer/Robot Interaction, and Cognitive Science.

Education

• MIT - Ph.D., Media Arts & Sciences, June 2006
• MIT - M.S., Media Arts & Sciences, September 2002
• University of Texas at Austin - B.S.E.E., May 1999

Honors and Awards

• Best Student Poster, HRI-2006
• Warner Bros. Research Fellowship, 2005
• Horowitz Research Fellowship, 2004
• Eircom Research Fellowship, 2001

Research Experience

Assistant Professor of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology (Aug. 2007 - present)
Faculty member of the Interactive Computing department associated with the Robotics and Intelligent Machines research center and the Graphics Visualization and Usability research center. Director of the Socially Intelligent Machines research lab, exploring various aspects of socially intelligent and socially interactive machines.

MIT Postdoctoral Associate (June. 2006 - July 2007)
The goals of my one-year post-doc with Prof. Cynthia Breazeal have been to publish and present my thesis research at four conferences; to prepare two journal publications of my thesis research; to conduct follow-up research with both the Sophie and Leonardo platforms; and to gain classroom and teaching experience. Additionally, this post-doc involves presenting work to sponsors, assisting in grant proposal preparations, and consulting with lab sponsors including senior management of Fortune 500 companies.

MIT Research Assistant to Professor Cynthia Breazeal (Sept. 2003 - June 2006)
In the Robotic Life Group, we develop robotic systems that can naturally work and learn with human partners. Additionally, this RA has involved presenting work, assisting in grant proposal preparations, and consulting with lab sponsors.

Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA, Internship at Microsoft Research (June 2003 - Sept. 2003)
Interned with the Communities Technologies Group (now Social Computing), led by Marc Smith. Expanded the group's Usenet technologies for mining social statistics to the realm of email. Developed data mining tools, incorporated statistics into the Outlook email client, and ran a usability study to evaluate the accuracy of the mined statistics.

MIT Research Assistant to Professor Ted Selker (Sept. 2000 - June 2003)
Assisted in the ongoing development of the Context Aware Computing Group laboratory, incorporating Artificial Intelligence and interactive computer systems.

IBM, Austin, TX, USA, Scientist/Engineer RS/6000 Division (June 1999 - July 2000)
Worked with a group of 12 engineers charged with simulating (in C++) the memory subsystems of a RISC symmetric multiprocessor, for the purpose of circuit design verification. I wrote a cache preloader to save millions of cycles needed to achieve specific cache states in processor simulation. I interned with this same group for several semesters during my undergraduate studies.

Teaching Experience

• Coordinator of the Robots Reading Group (Fall 2006): Organized a research reading group around the topic of Human-Robot Interaction. Choose weekly paper topics and lead group discussion.
• MAS 622J - Guest Lecture on Reinforcement Learning (Fall 2006): Taught an introductory lecture on Reinforcement Learning to a class of 30-40 MIT graduate students. Prepared an online activity as homework, interactively training an RL agent, to give the students hands-on experience with some of the algorithms presented in class.
• Teaching Assistant, Pattern Recognition (Fall 2006): One of two teaching assistants for the Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning course taught by Prof. Roz Picard, approximately 30 graduate students. In this course the TA responsibilities included: preparing 6-10 problem sets and their solutions; grading problem sets; teaching a one-hour recitation every other week; and holding open office hours 1-2 times a week.
• Teaching Assistant for a Context-Aware Computing Reading Group (Fall 2002): Prepared a reading list and lead group discussions for a class of graduate and undergraduate students.
• Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) mentor (Sept. 2000 - present): I have supervised undergraduate research projects for six MIT undergraduates for one or more semesters. Supervision has included teaching programming skills (Java, C), guiding architecture design, formulating research plans, and supervising the execution of experiments with human subjects.

Publications

http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~athomaz/pubs.html

Conference Presentations

• RO-MAN, 2007: ``Asymmetry of Human Feedback".
• ICDL, 2007: ``Robot learning via socially guided exploration".
• RO-MAN, 2006: "Reinforcement Learning with Human Teachers".
• IVA, 2006: "Teachable Characters".
• AAAI, 2006: "Reinforcement Learning with Human Teachers".
• ICDL, 2006: "Transparency and Socially Guided Machine Learning".
• NIPS Workshop, 2005: "Socially Guided Machine Learning: Designing an Algorithm to Learn from Real-Time Human Interaction".
• Android Science Workshop, 2005: "Robot Science Meets Social Science: An Embodied Computational Model of Social Referencing".
• AAAI Workshop, 2005: "Real-Time Interactive Reinforcement Learning for Robots".
• AAAI Workshop, 2004: "Robot Learning Through Collaborative Dialog".
• AAMAS, 2004: "Teaching and Working with Robots as Collaboration".
• Interact, 2003: "DriftCatcher: The Implicit Social Context of Email".
• AAAI Fall Symposium, 2002: "Personal Data for Personal Use".
• Sunbelt International Conference on Social Networks, 2002: "DriftCatcher: Enhancing Social Networks Trough Email".
• CHI 2001: "Cheese: Tracking Mouse Movements Websites a Tool for User Modeling".

Invited Talks

• Robotics and Intelligent Machines Seminar, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA, Feb. 2007.
• Cognitive Science Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, Feb. 2007.
• Robotics Institute Seminar, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, Feb. 2007.
• Artificial Intelligence Research Group, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, Feb. 2006.
• Computer Science Seminar, Brown University, Providence, R.I., Feb. 2006.
• Media Lab Digital Life and Things That Think Sponsor Events, Cambridge, MA, Nov. 2005.
• MIT TechLink Mentor Connection Forum, Cambridge, MA, April 2004.
• Media Lab Information:Organized Sponsor Event, Cambridge, MA, Oct. 2003.
• Media Lab Digital Life Sponsor Event, Cambridge, MA, Oct. 2001.
• Media Lab Europe Internal Research Symposium, Dublin, Ireland, Aug. 2001.
• Media Lab Europe Context-Aware Computing Workshop, Dublin, Ireland, June 2001.

Professional Activities

• Reviewer: Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2008)
• Area chair for Social Interfaces, International Conference on Multi-modal Interfaces (ICMI 2007)
• Organizing Committee member, HRI 2007 Young Researchers Workshop in conjunction with the HRI 2007 conference, Washington, D.C., March 2007.
• Reviewer: Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2007)
• Reviewer: ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2006)
• Reviewer: International Joint Conference on Nerual Networks (IJCNN 2006)
• Reviewer: Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2005)
• Reviewer: International Conference on Developmental Learning (ICDL 2005)