PhD Student interested in the intersection of kinesthetically curious driven education, augmented reality, and robotics
Funded through NSF Expeditions Grant for "Socially Assistive Robotics" and NSF National Robotics Initiative 2.0 Grant for "Communicate, Share, Adapt: A Mixed Reality Framework for Facilitating Robot Integration and Customization"
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Maja Matarić's Interaction Lab at the University of Southern California planning to defend December 2022. Post graduation I plan to pursue a full time position with potential in augmented reality, education, and/or robotics. I previously worked at iRobot for the summer of 2021 and in Chad Jenkins's Laboratory for Progress as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. I am working on augmented reality (e.g. Microsoft Hololens 2) to model and explore student's kinesthetic curiosity - the expression of student curiosity through movement. To do so, my team and I have created an open-source 3D visual programming language named MoveToCode. We leverage the multiple modalities of augmented reality to also expand a mobile robot tutor's action space to encourage higher a student's kinesthetic curiosity. We are also working on teaching robotics to older adults using virtual and augmented reality. We plan for these Shared Virtual Teaching Experiences to model a user's preferences and transfer these to a real-world multi-party activity aimed to bring older adults together.
Descriptions left brief for current projects. See contact at bottom of page if interested in getting involved.
A Review and Recommendations for Reporting Recruitment, Compensation, and Gender
Undergraduate led work on surveying the state of HRI study meta data reporting. Paper in HRI Workshop on Fairness and Transparency in HRI: Algorithms, Methods, and Metrics with an extension currently in review at RO-MAN 2022.
Combining Social and Functional Designs
Undergraduate led work on design considerations for increasing social and functional perception of AR robot appendages. Paper in VAM-HRI 2022.
long-term deployments and modelling.
Long term work on the NSF Expeditions in Computer: Socially Assitive Robotics. Paper on THRI.
for measuring student movement and curiosity.
Explored measure of student kinesthetic curiosity in pilot study. Paper in ISER '20
for measuring real-time system understanding
Explored mixed reality data from pilot study of MoveToCode for correlations with System Usability Scale scores. Paper in ICSR '20
for understanding audio levels
Deployed telepresence robots with audio level UI. Extended Abstract in Companion-HRI '20. Modelling paper recently accepted into ICMI 2021.
to increase robot social expressivity.
Created mixed reality arms for more social expression of a robot. Paper in proceedings of RO-MAN 2019. A video of the gestures can be found here.
for navigating to affordance templates
Worked at TRACLabs implementing a smoothed A-star planner with a dynamic window low level controller able to replan with dynamic objects. This included reviving the TRACBot reconfigurable modular mobile manipulator.
With point filtering
Looked into different point filtering and methods for a geometrically informed ICP. This also included creating a web based ICP visualization.
focusing on post processing visualization
Reimplemented a SLAM post processing method proposed by Edwin Olson in Fast Iterative Alignment of Pose Graphs with Poor Initial Estimates. Tested with the Fetch mobile manipulator.
Reach Out If you want to Get Involved!
I currently oversee 2 USC undergraduate students in İpek Göktan and Karen Ly as well as Massimiliano Nigro, a visiting master's student from Politecnico di Milano. All students can be found on the Interaction People Page. Previously I have overseen Chloe Kuo, Julia Cordero, Adam Wathieu , Jenny Lee, Nisha Chatwani, Karen Berba, Daniel Ramirez, Radhika Agrawal, Kartik Mahajan, Roddur Dasgupta, Roxanna Pakkar, Zhonghao Shi, Ryan Stevenson and Adnan Karim. I also have mentored high school students Annika Modi, Jacob Zhi, İpek Göktan, Mena Hassan, Ashley Perez, and Bryan Pyo as a part of the USC SHINE program.
Post graduation I plan to pursue a full time position with potential in augmented reality, education, and/or robotics. Outside of lab, I used to help out at Clifford Street Elementary School with their new 5th grade VEX robotics team. I also was a part of a TEALS volunteer team at LACES Highschool teaching AP Computer Science for the 2019-2020 school year. I created and currently maintain the US Women in Academic Robotics Research website. If you would like to help out, feel free to contact me, my advisor Maja Matarić, or directly submit requests to add people via the website.
| School | Degree | Started | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|
 University of Southern California - Los Angeles |
Computer Science PhD | 2018 | Present |
| University of Southern California - Los Angeles |
Computer Science Master's | 2018 | 2021 |
 University of Michigan - Ann Arbor |
Computer Science B.S.E. | 2014 | 2018 |
If you are interested in getting involved with the Interaction Lab, please read our current research before contacting. I am no longer taking new students but am happy to answer questions about how to get involved in the lab!
