[Colloquium] 3/25 Maia Stiber (Johns Hopkins) Human-Aware Robots: Social Signals in Human-Robot Interaction

[Holly Santos via Colloquium]

Department of Computer Science Presents

Maia Stiber
PhD Candidate
Johns Hopkins University

Tuesday, March 25th
2:00pm - 3:00pm
In Person: John Crerar Library Rm 390

https://uchicagogroup.zoom.us/j/92510571481?pwd=wqqOoq2RJ3YpRgaolk7zM3a7dvG2OG.1

Meeting ID: 925 1057 1481
Passcode: 081681

Title: Human-Aware Robots: Social Signals in Human-Robot Interaction

Abstract: Effective human-robot interaction requires robots that can interpret and adapt to human behavior in real-time. My research advances human-aware robotics by using social signals to understand human internal states and models. I examine human reactions to misalignment—moments when users’ mental models about the robot, task, or world diverge from reality. Misalignments can cause interaction breakdowns, but also provide useful information about task context and user perception. I apply this approach in two areas: providing robots with error awareness and with user confusion awareness in physically situated tasks. To achieve this, I build models that use behavioral signals to detect errors and user confusion, develop proactive, multimodal interactive robots to engage users in the error detection process, and demonstrate that behavioral signals—especially when contextualized—can be used for flexible detection of these misalignments. This research is a step towards deploying human-aware robots that can adapt to user behaviors, improving performance, reliability, and acceptance of interactive robots in everyday environments.

Biography: Maia Stiber is a PhD graduate in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on understanding and modeling human behavior to develop human-aware capabilities in human-robot interaction. She has interned at Microsoft Research and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Caltech and an M.S.E. in Computer Science from JHU. She was named an ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Pioneer in 2024 and was awarded membership in the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) Doctoral Consortium in 2022.

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Host: Sarah Sebo
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Holly Santos
Executive Assistant to Hank Hoffmann, Chairman
Department of Computer Science
The University of Chicago
5730 S Ellis Ave-217   Chicago, IL 60637
P: 773-834-8977
hsantos at uchicago.edu

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