About Me

I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at George Mason University. My research intersects robotics, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. I develop and evaluate innovative algorithms and user interfaces that enable seamless human-robot task communication, ultimately empowering non-experts to create personalized robotic applications.

At Mason, I direct the Autonomous Robot Interaction Laboratory. I am also a member of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center.

Prior to joining Mason, I was a computer scientist at the US Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), and prior to that, a postdoctoral research associate also at NRL. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022, advised by Drs. Bilge Mutlu and Aws Albarghouthi.

You can find my CV here.

News

8.25

Joined GMU as an Assistant Professor!

8.25

My co-author Vincent Hsiao will present our work on Bootstrapping Human-Like Planning via LLMs at RO-MAN 2025.

8.25

🏆 Won the NRC/ASEE Postdoctoral Research Publications Award for Goal-Oriented End-User Programming of Robots.

3.25

🏆 Won best HRI short contribution for An Interaction Specification Language for Human-Robot Interaction.

3.25

Invited talk at the HRI 2025 workshop on The Road to Reliable Robots: Interpretable, Accessible, and Reproducible HRI Research.

12.24

Guest lecture for CMSC 722 at the University of Maryland, College Park.

11.24

2nd AAAI Fall Symposium on Unifying Representations for Robot Application Development.

8.24

Completed my postdoc and began a full position at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

4.24

Invited talk at Johns Hopkins University LCSR seminar.

3.24

Full paper talk at HRI 2024: Goal-Oriented End-User Development of Robots.

Projects

Human-Like LLM Planning

RO-MAN 2025 paper

Evaluates the ability of four different LLMs to produce human-like plans.

Uncertainty Expression

AAMAS 2025 paper

Three different interfaces for eliciting probability distributions from users.

POLARIS

HRI 2024 paper

Robot end-user programming with assistance from AI planning.

INTERACTION SPECIFICATION LANGUAGE

UR-RAD 2023 symposium website

RO-MAN 2023 paper

AAAI Spring Symposium 2023 paper

Standardizing robot application development via a common, intermediate representation.

TABULA

HRI 2023 paper, video, code

Facilitating on-the-fly robot application development through a combination of sketching and spoken language.

CROWDSOURCING TASK TRACES

HRI 2023 LBR paper, video, code+data+study

Collecting examples of step-by-step tasks through an easy-to-use crowdsourcing interface.

FIGARO

CHI 2021 paper, video, code

A tabletop programming-by-demonstration interface for HRI. Play out what you want the robot to do with figurines, and Figaro will assemble an executable program.